The twenty most important people in the history of book publishing
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I was asked a couple of weeks ago to name some of the most important people in the history of trade publishing. I couldn’t come up with much of an answer, so I did a bit of homework and I’ve come up with this very tentative list of the twenty most important people in the history of book publishing.
A few parameters. I’m concentrating on people who contributed to the adult book trade. I’m leaving aside the academic, scientific, and religious presses and children’s literature, not because they’re uninteresting but because I know even less about those sectors. I’ve tried to find people who represent different dimensions of the business and I’ve over-indexed on the last two centuries. There are many people between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries who deserve consideration. Someone who knows the territory better can do that list.
The order of presentation is roughly chronological. I consider this a draft. If you want to nominate someone I’ve missed, or cancel someone I’ve included, leave a comment below. Enjoy.
William Caxton: An English merchant who spent some time in Bruges where he started a printing press and in 1473-4 released the first book printed in the English language, Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. He brought his expertise back to England, set up a press in Westminster, and produced editions of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Generally recognized as the English language’s first commercial publisher, his more than 100 books went a long way toward standardizing the English language.
Jacob Tonson: Active in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, he published Dryden and Milton, among other major figures of the Augustan age. More importantly, he recognized and helped to establish the enduring value of literary property. He secured the copyright to Shakespeare’s plays and more or less invented the economic logic that has underpinned trade publishing ever since: the publisher exclusively manages and exploits the intellectual property of the author.
John Murray: The second publisher of the firm of that name, he was critical to the establishment of the publishing house as a prestige cultural institution. Based in London, Murray published many of the defining authors of the early nineteenth century, including Lord Byron, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen. His firm’s editorial judgment, author relationships, and sophisticated marketing conferred authority on everything it published. Murray represents the matriculation of the publisher from glorified printer to cultural curator.
George Palmer Putnam: Founder of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, he published Washington Irving and Francis Parkman and built one of the most successful early trade houses in the United States. I had many options for this slot, including the boys at Harper & Brothers, who might be credited as the first US publishing company to operate on a national scale. I’m giving the nod to Putnam because he broke with the widespread American habit of supporting the business by pirating English books, choosing instead to develop his own list of original American books.
Charles Darwin: One of the few authors on our list, Darwin profoundly altered the scope and ambitions of trade publishing by demonstrating that serious scientific work could become a global commercial phenomenon. When On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859, it sold well beyond academic circles, reaching a broad educated readership and generating intense public debate. His success showed publishers that intellectually demanding nonfiction could attract large audiences, paving the way for a thriving market in popular science and serious trade nonfiction.
Charles Dickens: He not only wrote some of the greatest fiction we have, but shaped both the modern commercial system of fiction publishing and the celebrity culture of literature. Beginning with The Pickwick Papers in the 1830s, Dickens’s novels were published in cheap standalone monthly instalments that reached an enormous readership and created sustained public anticipation for each new chapter. Dickens also exercised unusual control over the business side of his work, negotiating contracts, managing public readings, and shaping the marketing of his books. He taught authors how to become their own commercial engines within the broader publishing system.
Charles Edward Mudie: The Victorian circulating library is pretty much forgotten in our time of free public libraries. Mudie’s inexpensive service (a guinea a year) supplied books to thousands of subscribers across Britain, allowing them to borrow new titles they otherwise might not have been able to afford. Because Mudie bought large quantities of new novels, publishers increasingly tailored their lists to his preferences. The famous “three-volume novel” format became common partly to meet his library’s needs. We’ve become accustomed to retail intermediaries wielding enormous power in the business—they trace back to Mudie. Another measure of his contribution: his library pops up constantly in the literature of the era—Trollope, Wilde, H. G. Wells, and Virginia Woolf.
George Routledge: Another of the industry’s great democratizers, Routledge played a major role in expanding the readership for books through cheap reprints and innovative distribution. Starting as a bookseller and publisher in London, he issued affordable editions of popular works and sold them through bookstalls in the rapidly expanding network of railways in nineteenth-century Britain. His inexpensive editions brought literature within reach of a much broader middle-class public, foreshadowing the later paperback and mass market revolutions.
Ottmar Mergenthaler: He never worked directly in the book business, but Mergenthaler massively improved it by inventing the Linotype machine in 1884. Prior to Linotype, typesetting required printers to assemble individual metal letters by hand, a laborious process. Mergenthaler’s machine automated the creation of entire lines of type, dramatically increasing the speed and efficiency of printing, making it possible to produce books (and newspapers and magazines) at greater scale and lower cost. This brought the book industry fully into the industrial age and supported the explosive growth of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
A. P. Watt: Dismissed in his time as a meddler, an interloper, and a leech, Watt is widely regarded as the first professional literary agent. He began representing authors in negotiations with publishers in the 1870s, ensuring fairer compensation and more advantageous contractual terms for them. The likes of Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, and J. M. Barrie trusted him and relied upon him, and henceforth literary agents have always part of the landscape. Watt also helped systematize the sale of subsidiary rights—serialization and foreign editions—which were becoming increasingly lucrative sources of revenue to both publishers and authors.
Arthur Conan Doyle: More than any other author, Conan Doyle demonstrated the immense commercial potential of recurring characters and serialized storytelling, staples of genre fiction to this day. The adventures of Sherlock Holmes first appeared in magazines before being collected in books and breaking out as one of the most enduring fictional franchises in literary history. Franchise storytelling has been a big commercial engine in book publishing ever since. I’d be fine to have him share this place with Agatha Christie, who wasn’t as early as Conan Doyle but took things to another level.
The Woolfs: Leonard and his wife and partner, Virginia, founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, initially operating it from their home. Hogarth became one of the most influential small presses of the twentieth century, publishing great modernist writers—Virginia, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster—as well as seminal works in politics and psychology. It proved that a tiny operation can have an enormous cultural impact. To this day, the Woolfs’ venture, in which they were equal partners with a sensible division of labour, is inspiration to thousands of independent presses who prize intellectual and artistic values over commercial aspirations.
Alfred A. Knopf: Along with his hugely under-appreciated wife, Blanche, Knopf set standards for tastemaking and literary ambition that will never be matched. He published some of the best authors from around the world—Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, Albert Camus, John Updike, Toni Morrison. His books were impeccably edited and beautifully designed. He won all the awards. Most publishers like to think they have a distinct identity that extends beyond their individual titles, Knopf actually did. Honourable mention here to Horace Liveright, without whose example I’m not sure Knopf is possible.
Dale Carnegie: This placement has to be shared with Samuel Smiles, author of Self-Help, a great success on publication in 1859 and the true founder of what we know as the self-help genre. I’m giving it to Carnegie because his How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) transformed self-help into what is probably the largest and most durable nonfiction category today. How to Win Friends not only sold in excess of 30 million copies but taught generations of self-help gurus how to use a book to branch out as speakers and educators in support of their careers.
Maxwell Perkins: Because we need an editor on this list. Perkins plied his trade at Charles Scribner’s Sons, where he shaped the manuscripts and guided the careers of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and many others. There were good editors at other publishing houses, but Perkins exemplified the rise of the professional editor as the central creative figure within a publishing operation.
Allen Lane: Was any twentieth-century publisher more innovative and iconic than Penguin? Lane believed that high-quality literature should be affordable to ordinary readers, and he figured out how to do it with highly templated paperback editions. Penguin’s distinctive branding and inexpensive format dramatically expanded the public for quality literature.
Bennett Cerf: I’m in the middle of Gayle Feldman’s lo-o-o-ng biography of Cerf, the co-founder of Random House, and I’m not sure I much like him. There is no doubt, however, that he helped build one of the most influential publishing houses of the twentieth century. His major contribution, for better or worse, was as an acquisitor, bringing multiple and diverse companies (including Knopf) under the Random House umbrella. That the last half century has seen relentless consolidation and Penguin Random House stands as the largest publishing company in the world is Cerf’s primary legacy.
Harry Scherman: It’s difficult to describe just how influential Scherman’s Book-of-the-Month Club was in the last century. Founded in 1926, it offered its millions of subscribers a carefully selected book each month, chosen by a panel of mostly respectable judges. The books it promoted enjoyed enormous guaranteed sales, and its reasonably elevated selections expanded the audience for serious literature and nonfiction.
Toni Morrison: If a single person can be said to have broken the white male stranglehold on the book industry, this is her. As an important editor and first-rate novelist, Morrison did more than anyone to bring Black writers and stories into mainstream trade publishing. She edited the likes of Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali, and won both the Pulitzer and the Nobel for her own writing. Book publishing is still not very diverse, but Morrison did her part.
Jeff Bezos: I don’t like to end on this note, but we’re listing important people in the history of trade publishing—not necessarily talented or admirable people. Arguably the biggest changes in the last several decades have occurred on the retail front, first with Leonard Riggio and his Barnes & Noble chain of superstores, and next with Bezos and what quickly became the first popular online platform for books and, in the blink of an eye, the dominant retail outlet for books and everything else. And he’s been a leading force in the e-book, audiobook, and self-publishing revolutions of the last decade. Love him, hate him, hate him some more—you can’t ignore Bezos.
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i think someone should do a canadian list. won't be me, unless i can exclude the living - great way to lose friends and make enemies.
First revision i'd make to the list: take out mergenthaler, whose contribution was neither specifically English nor directly about book publishing. Two candidates to replace him: Grove Press founder Barney Rossett, and Richard Bonnycastle, founder of Harlequin.