Kirkus Reviews

• 1. Introduction

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  Kirkus Reviews was founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus, a woman who had just lost her job at one of America's most storied publishing houses. She launched a service to give booksellers and librarians a critical edge: advance looks at books before they hit shelves. That core idea, previewing books before publication, still drives the magazine today. What makes Kirkus remarkable is not simply its longevity, but the institutional turbulence it survived along the way. It was sold repeatedly, nearly shut for good at the end of 2009, then rescued weeks later. It has changed its name six times. And through all of it, the reviews kept coming, twice a month, every month. How did a one-woman operation built on galley proofs outlast the Depression, multiple corporate owners, and a near-death experience in the digital age? That story begins not with publishing, but with a decision made deep inside Harper and Brothers.

• 2. Virginia Kirkus and the Origin

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  Harper and Brothers hired Virginia Kirkus in 1926 to build something the company did not yet have: a dedicated children's book department. She spent years developing it. Then the Depression arrived, and in 1932 the department was eliminated as a cost-cutting measure. Within a year, her former secretary Louise Raymond had successfully argued for funding to restore the division and took over as its leader. Kirkus, who had already left the company during that interim period, did not return. Instead, she started her own service. Her initial arrangement was modest. She secured galley proofs of roughly twenty books before their publication and circulated reviews of those titles to booksellers and librarians who needed to make buying decisions early. Almost eighty years after that quiet start, the service she built was receiving hundreds of books every week and reviewing around a hundred of them.

• 3. A Name in Constant Motion

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  From 1933 to 1954, the publication was called Bulletin by Kirkus' Bookshop Service. On the 1st of January 1955, the name shifted to Bulletin from Virginia Kirkus' Service. The 15th of December 1964 issue carried a shorter version: Virginia Kirkus' Service. By 1967, it had become simply Kirkus Service. Then, on the 1st of January 1969, the publication took its current title, Kirkus Reviews. Each change tracked something real about the organization's sense of itself. The early names kept Virginia Kirkus personally at the center. The later ones stepped back from her name and toward the work the publication actually did. The current title, stripped of its founder's name, has now outlasted all the others.

• 4. Ownership and Near-Closure

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  Kirkus Reviews was sold to The New York Review of Books in 1970, which in turn sold it to Barbara Bader and Josh Rubins, who also served as its editors. Magazine consultant James B. Kobak acquired the publication in 1985. David LeBreton bought it from Kobak in 1993. BPI Communications, owned by Dutch publisher VNU, acquired it from LeBreton in 1999. At the end of 2009, the company announced it was shutting down entirely. That announcement came while VNU, by then renamed The Nielsen Company, still held the asset. On the 10th of February 2010, businessman Herbert Simon purchased the journal from Nielsen. The terms were not disclosed. Simon renamed the company Kirkus Media and appointed book-industry veteran Marc Winkelman as publisher. The closure that seemed final lasted only weeks.

• 5. Inside the Review Process

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  Anne Larsen joined Kirkus in 1985 as fiction editor, soon moved into the top editorial role, and remained head of the publication until 2006. During those two decades she reshaped the house style, pushing the reviews toward greater readability, concision, accuracy, and impact. Kirkus Reviews publishes on the 1st and 15th of each month and previews more than ten thousand titles per year. Its traditional reviewing program does not require payment from publishers. A separate program exists for independent authors, who may pay for a review but cannot modify or influence what the reviewer writes. Whether that review appears on the Kirkus website is the author's choice; whether it graduates to the magazine or email newsletter is the editors' decision alone.

• 6. The Kirkus Prize

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  In 2014, Kirkus Reviews launched the Kirkus Prize, awarding fifty thousand dollars annually in each of three categories: fiction, nonfiction, and young readers' literature. The prize made Kirkus a participant in the public conversation about literary distinction, not just a trade tool for pre-publication buying decisions. The award reflects how far the organization had traveled from Virginia Kirkus circulating reviews of roughly twenty advance titles to booksellers in 1933.