Categories Literary magazine Founder Frank Howard Dodd Final issue 1933 | Frequency Monthly Year founded 1895 | |
 | ||
Former editors Harry Thurston Peck, Arthur Bartlett Maurice, G.G. Wyant, John C. Farrar, Burton Rascoe, Seward B. Collins | ||
The Bookman was a literary journal established in 1895 by Dodd, Mead and Company. It drew its name from the phrase, "I am a Bookman," by James Russell Lowell. The phrase regularly appeared on the cover and title page of the bound edition.
Frank H. Dodd, head of Dodd, Mead and Company, established The Bookman in 1895. Its first editor was Harry Thurston Peck, who worked on its staff from 1895 to 1906. With the journal's first issue in February 1895, Peck created America's first bestseller list. The lists in The Bookman ran from 1895 until 1918, and is the only comprehensive source of annual bestsellers in the United States from 1895-1912, when Publishers Weekly began publishing their own lists.
In 1918, the journal was bought by the George H. Doran Company and then sold in 1927 to Burton Rascoe and Seward B. Collins. After Rascoe's departure in 1928, Collins continued to edit and publish the magazine until it ceased publication in 1933.
It was edited by Arthur Bartlett Maurice (1873–1946) from 1899 to 1916; by G.G. Wyant from 1916 to 1918; and by John C. Farrar during the years it was owned by George H. Doran. Only under the brief editorship of Burton Rascoe from 1927-28 did it abandon its conservative standards and political stance, publishing, for example, Upton Sinclair's novel Boston. Its last editor was Seward Collins, under whose editorship The Bookman carried articles conforming to his conservative views, influenced by Irving Babbitt, and promoted humanism and distributism. Collins himself was moving towards a far-right and fascist during his years as editor. When The Bookman ceased publication in 1933, Collins launched The American Review.