Short answers, pulled from the story.
Publishers Weekly was founded by bibliographer Frederick Leypoldt in the late 1860s and adopted its current name in 1872. It has published continuously since then, making it one of the longest-running trade publications in American history.
Harry Thurston Peck created the world's first bestseller list in 1895 for The Bookman, a related publication where he served as editor-in-chief. Publishers Weekly launched its own bestseller lists in 1912, modeled on Peck's format, and separated fiction from nonfiction rankings in 1917.
Publishers Weekly publishes prepublication reviews of approximately 9,000 new trade books each year. Reviews are anonymous, average 200 to 250 words, and appear two to four months before a book's official publication date. The magazine maintains a digitized archive of 200,000 reviews.
Frederic Gershom Melcher was editor, co-editor, and later chairman of Publishers Weekly's parent company R. R. Bowker over four decades, from 1918 until his death in 1963. He helped create Children's Book Week in 1919 and succeeded Richard Rogers Bowker as company president in 1933.
Publishers Weekly is owned by PWxyz, LLC, the company through which George W. Slowik Jr., a former publisher of the magazine, purchased it from Reed Business Information in April 2010. PWxyz also acquired The Millions in 2019.
Sybil Steinberg served as a reviews editor at Publishers Weekly for 30 years starting in the mid-1970s. She introduced the starred review, a first in the industry for denoting books of exceptional merit, created the annual "Best Books" lists, and compiled four anthologies of PW author interviews published by the Pushcart Press beginning in 1992.