Publishers Weekly

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Publishers Weekly has been landing on the desks of booksellers, librarians, and literary agents every week since 1872. That is not a typo. The magazine predates the telephone, the light bulb, and the Brooklyn Bridge, and it has never stopped publishing. For most of those years it carried a tagline that told you exactly what it thought of itself: "The International News Magazine of Book Publishing and Bookselling." What began as a simple list of new books compiled by a single bibliographer grew into an institution that shaped which books got reviewed, which titles landed on bestseller lists, and which authors broke through to a national audience. How does a trade magazine survive for more than a century and a half? And what does it mean that this particular publication quietly invented some of the most powerful tools in the book world, including the very idea of the bestseller list? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. Leypoldt's List

  ›

  Frederick Leypoldt founded the magazine in the late 1860s, not yet certain what to call it. He tried several titles before settling, in 1872, on The Publishers' Weekly, apostrophe included. His core idea was practical: gather information about newly published books directly from publishers and from other sources, then pass that information along to the booksellers who needed it. By 1876, that formula had reached nine tenths of the booksellers in the country. That kind of penetration, achieved in fewer than a decade, says something about how starved the trade was for reliable information.

  Leypoldt's friend Richard Rogers Bowker bought the magazine from him in 1878. Leypoldt wanted time for his other bibliographic work, and the sale made sense for both men. Augusta Garrigue Leypoldt, Frederick's wife, stayed on with the publication for thirty years after the sale, providing a continuity the magazine's new owner could rely on.

  A connected publication, The Bookman, launched in 1895 with Harry Thurston Peck as its first editor-in-chief. Peck served on its staff from 1895 to 1906, and in 1895, working within those pages, he created the world's first bestseller list. That list would inspire Publishers Weekly to build its own version seventeen years later.

• 3. The Melcher Era

  ›

  Frederic Gershom Melcher was born on the 12th of April, 1879, in Malden, Massachusetts. At age sixteen he took a job at Boston's Estes & Lauriat Bookstore, and that early exposure to the trade shaped the rest of his career. He moved to Indianapolis in 1913 for another bookstore position, and then in 1918 he read an item in Publishers' Weekly itself announcing that the magazine's editorship was vacant.

  He wrote to Richard Rogers Bowker, was hired, and relocated with his family to Montclair, New Jersey. He would stay with R. R. Bowker for 45 years. Over four decades he served as editor, co-editor, and eventually chairman of Bowker, the magazine's parent company. No single figure spent more time shaping what Publishers Weekly was and what it covered.

  In 1919, Melcher joined forces with Franklin K. Mathiews, the librarian for the Boy Scouts of America, and Anne Carroll Moore, a librarian at the New York Public Library, to launch Children's Book Week. He had already been carving out space in the magazine for books aimed at younger readers, and this initiative extended that advocacy beyond the printed page.

  When Bowker died in 1933, Melcher stepped up to lead the company as president. He held that post until 1959, when he stepped back to become chairman of the board. The following year, in 1963, Melcher died. His name belongs alongside the magazine's founders as a force that defined its character across most of the twentieth century.

• 4. Bestseller Lists and Their Origins

  ›

  In 1912, Publishers Weekly launched its own bestseller lists, modeled on what Harry Thurston Peck had done for The Bookman. For the first five years, fiction and nonfiction sat together in a single ranking. That changed in 1917, when the reading public's appetite for nonfiction surged alongside the United States' entry into World War I, and the magazine separated the two categories to reflect that shift.

  Also in 1943, the magazine created the Carey-Thomas Award for creative publishing, naming it after Mathew Carey and Isaiah Thomas. That award tied the magazine's identity to a broader sense of mission within the industry, not just reporting on what was published but recognizing the craft of publishing itself.

• 5. Corporate Hands

  ›

  For most of its history, Publishers Weekly sat within the portfolio of its founding publisher, R. R. Bowker. That changed in 1985, when Reed Publishing bought Bowker from Xerox and placed Publishers Weekly under the management of Cahners Publishing Company, based in Boston. Cahners was a trade publishing empire that Reed had acquired in 1977, and it was built by Norman Cahners.

  The landscape shifted again in 1993, when Reed merged with the Netherlands-based Elsevier. The merger brought cutbacks across Cahners titles as the combined company absorbed the turmoil of the deal. It was in the early 1990s that Nora Rawlinson, who had run a book selection budget of four million dollars at the Baltimore County Library System and then edited Library Journal for four years, became editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly. She held that post until 2005.

  In April 2010, George W. Slowik Jr., a former publisher of the magazine, bought Publishers Weekly from Reed Business Information through a company called PWxyz, LLC. That purchase returned the magazine to independent hands for the first time in decades. In 2019, PWxyz added The Millions to its holdings.

• 6. The Review Machine

  ›

  The book review section was added in the early 1940s and became one of the magazine's most defining features. Reviews appear two to four months before a book's publication date, giving booksellers and librarians time to plan orders before a title hits shelves. The magazine currently publishes prepublication reviews of 9,000 new trade books each year, drawing on a digitized archive that now holds 200,000 reviews.

  Those reviews are short by design, averaging 200 to 250 words, and they are anonymous. In the past, a staff of eight editors assigned books to more than 100 freelance reviewers, some of them published authors, others specialists in particular genres. Reviewers were paid $45 per review until June 2008, when that rate was cut to $25. That same month, the magazine began crediting reviewers by name in the issues carrying their work.

  Genevieve Stuttaford joined the PW staff in 1975 as the nonfiction "Forecasts" editor, having previously worked at Saturday Review, Kirkus Reviews, and for twelve years on the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle. During her 23 years at Publishers Weekly, she expanded the annual review count from an average of 3,800 titles in the 1970s to well over 6,500 titles by 1997. She retired in 1998.

  Sybil Steinberg arrived at the magazine in the mid-1970s and served as a reviews editor for 30 years. Under her direction, PW introduced the starred review, a first in the industry, to signal books of exceptional merit. She also introduced boxed reviews and originated the annual "Best Books" lists, which she timed to run in November, typically ahead of similar lists from other major review venues. Beginning in 1992, Steinberg also compiled four anthologies of PW's author interviews, all published by the Pushcart Press.

  Barbara Bannon led fiction reviewing during the 1970s and into the early 1980s, eventually becoming the magazine's executive editor before retiring in 1983. She was the first reviewer to insist that her name be attached to any blurb drawn from her reviews, a move that made the magazine's influence on a book's commercial prospects harder to ignore. Reviews director Louisa Ermelino, formerly of InStyle magazine, joined Publishers Weekly in 2005 and by 2013 was overseeing close to 9,000 reviews per year. Under Ermelino, self-published books were integrated into the main review section alongside traditionally published titles.

• 7. Reinvention and Turbulence

  ›

  Sara Nelson took over as editor-in-chief in 2005, known for her columns in the New York Post and The New York Observer. She brought in illustrator and graphic designer Jean-Claude Suares to redesign the magazine and moved the logo to a simple set of initials, formalizing the nickname PW that the book industry had been using for years.

  Nelson introduced the Quill Awards, with nominees across 19 categories selected by a board of 6,000 booksellers and librarians. Winners were chosen by the reading public, who could vote at kiosks in Borders stores or online. Reed Business dropped the awards in 2008.

  In January 2009, with advertising revenue falling, Reed dismissed Nelson along with executive editor Daisy Maryles, who had spent more than four decades at PW. Brian Kenney, editorial director of both School Library Journal and Library Journal, stepped in as editorial director. The magazine's circulation in 2008 stood at 25,000, a readership that in 2004 had broken down to 6,000 publishers, 5,500 public libraries, 3,800 booksellers, 1,600 authors and writers, and 1,500 college and university libraries, among other categories.

  On the 22nd of September, 2011, PW launched a series of weekly podcasts under the title "Beyond the Book: PW's Week Ahead." The magazine also maintains an online archive of book reviews stretching back to January 1991, with the earliest articles posted dating to November 1995. A redesigned website went live on the 10th of May, 2010, and in 2014 PW launched BookLife.com, a dedicated site for self-published books, marking a formal acknowledgment of a market the magazine had long kept at arm's length.