HARPER & BROTHERS

The firm that became Harper & Brothers was established in New York in March 1817, first called J. & J. Harper until the founding brothers James (1795–1869) and John (1797–1875) were joined by their younger brothers Wesley (1801–1870) and Fletcher (1806–1877) and the name was changed on 29 October 1833. The firm led the early industrialization of book publishing and shaped American mass culture with the creation and widespread distribution of Harper's New Monthly Magazine and Harper's Weekly in the 1850s. The company had its greatest influence in the three decades after the Civil War, when Harper textbooks instructed students, Harper trade books lined family shelves, and Harper periodicals illustrated current affairs and guided national thought. By century's end, however, Harper was considered an oldfashioned "family" publisher, and the evolving literary marketplace compelled its corporate reorganization. Not until nearly 130 years later was the name again changed, this time to Harper & Row, upon the merger of Harper & Brothers with Row, Peterson & Company of Evanston, Illinois, on 30 April 1962. Following other mergers and reorganizations, the firm continues in the early twenty-first century as HarperCollins, one of the largest publishing houses in the world.

HARPER'S BOOK BUSINESS

Harper & Brothers was the leading book publisher in the United States for most of the nineteenth century. By 1859, despite a fire that destroyed its facilities in December 1853, the firm was selling two million volumes annually from its splendid new Franklin Square complex, whose "buildings were the first large commercial buildings to make skeletal use of wrought-iron columns and supporting trusses" (Exman, p. 42). Harper, which had started as a print shop for others' books, soon became one of only three major firms before 1900 that printed and manufactured its own books, and it quickly exploited such technological innovations as stereotyping, electrotyping, and steam presses. Joseph W. Harper Jr., the firm's literary head from 1875 to 1894, believed the company of the 1880s was "inconveniently large" (Tebbel 2:192). It then had about eight hundred employees—mostly in printing and manufacturing—and four thousand books in print. Bookman's first list of the ten best-sellers in fiction, issued in 1895, included four Harper titles.

However, in the competitive and unpredictable publishing business no firm, including Harper, ever came close to monopolizing the industry. Of the 111 titles between 1865 and 1914 whose sales equaled 1 percent of the U.S. population in the decade when they were published, Harper had the most of any single firm—nine. And although still one of the largest publishers in 1914, Harper's gross sales were less than 2 percent of the industry total. The power wielded by the House of Harper derived more from cultural influence than from economic dominance.

Before international copyright law was passed in 1891, American publishers operated on a mixture of piracy and principles. The Harpers built their business on legal pirating of popular British works, and British reprints continued to be their major stock-in-trade in the Gilded Age. By then, however, larger publishers had established trade courtesies to limit competition among themselves, and Harper generally paid English authors, often handsomely, in order to foster goodwill, establish quasi-contractual relationships, or secure early access to manuscripts. Against cheap competitors, however, Harper used harsh business tactics, selling books such as the Franklin Square Library at a loss to make piracy of their backlist unprofitable.

Harper & Brothers thus played a prominent but contradictory role in the international copyright debate. The four Harper brothers of the founding generation explicitly opposed international copyright, but in 1875 Joseph W. (known as "Brooklyn Joe" to distinguish him from cousins with the same name) changed the official company stance. He calculated that Harper had already paid about $250,000 to English authors and would be better served if such investment secured legal protection. He cowrote a draft called the "Harper treaty" that temporarily stimulated international negotiations in 1880, and he participated in copyright discussions throughout the decade. Privately, however, some competitors suggested that Brooklyn Joe wasn't as fully committed to international copyright as he publicly declared.

English reprints were not Harper's only book business. College textbooks and reference works were profitable from the beginning, and the growth of public education made elementary schoolbooks lucrative as well. American works were also increasingly popular, despite being priced higher than English reprints. Civil War accounts and centennial themes provided fertile ground for American writers. Biographies, histories, religious treatises, and exotic travel narratives such as Henry M. Stanley's Through the Dark Continent (1878) sold well. In all these genres Harper used its advanced printing abilities and stellar art department to produce distinctively illustrated books.

HARPER'S PERIODICALS

Harper's industrial methods changed book publishing, but its periodicals changed the literary marketplace. Harper was first to integrate book and magazine publishing with the creation of Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1850. The magazine's new form and national reach soon produced unprecedented circulations of 140,000 per month. Harper's Weekly, launched in 1857, targeted an even larger—but still scrupulously respectable—audience as a self-proclaimed "family newspaper" (Mott 2:470) subtitled A Journal of Civilization. Americans found the weekly's Civil War coverage indispensable, and thereafter its powerful combination of politics, current events, copious illustration, serial fiction, travel writing, and national advertising brought a weekly circulation of 160,000. A second weekly, Harper's Bazar, was launched in 1867 and within a few weeks had gained a circulation of 100,000. Envisioned as a Harper's Weekly aimed at women, with fashion and home economics replacing politics, its subtitle was A Repository of Fashion, Pleasure, and Instruction. By 1880 the Bazar had a circulation of 150,000.

Fletcher Harper, the youngest of the four founding brothers, guided these periodicals—and particularly Harper's Weekly—until shortly before his death on 29 May 1877. The brothers originally envisioned Harper's Magazine as a means to utilize manuscripts, employ their technologically increased printing capacity, and advertise their books. But Fletcher soon perceived the magazines as a fundamentally new enterprise with new editorial challenges and commercial opportunities. He insisted on founding the Bazar when his brothers objected. After Fletcher died, his nephew Brooklyn Joe (1830–1896) and his grandson J. Henry Harper (1850–1938) guided the periodicals.

Harper & Brothers further subdivided the "family newspaper" in 1879 by adding Harper's Young People, another illustrated weekly. The journal's prospectus cautioned that "in this age of the press, half of the influences which mould mind and character must be drawn from what [young people] read in hours of recreation," and it promised "the best and fittest literature which genius and enterprise can furnish" (Harper, p. 457). The magazine had considerable initial success, but by the early 1890s it was losing money and was discontinued in 1899.

The Harper magazines had considerable cultural influence in postbellum America. Thomas Nast (1840–1902) became a celebrity on Harper's Weekly's national stage for his political cartoons attacking New York City's corrupt Tammany Hall. Nast also invented and popularized enduring cultural symbols such as the Republican elephant, the Democratic donkey, and—drawing on his German immigrant heritage—the modern Santa Claus. Nast's cartoons and the editor George William Curtis's editorials demonstrated how powerfully new national media could influence the country's politics. Harper's Weekly's abundance of timely illustrations and its early use of visually appealing display ads also influenced the shift toward image-based mass culture.

BUSINESS TRANSITIONS

Harper & Brothers became a legal partnership in May 1860, so when the founding generation died in the 1870s, its sons were in position to continue the business successfully. By the 1890s, however, the company had serious financial problems stemming from the economic depression of 1893, the need to liquidate equities of second-generation partners who had died or retired, and the numerous third-generation Harpers drawing large salaries. Forced to borrow money, Harper & Brothers was reorganized in 1896 as a stock company heavily indebted to J. P. Morgan. In 1899 they failed to make their interest payments and went into receivership, and the Harper family no longer controlled the business.

The new president, George Brinton McClellan Harvey (1864–1928), had been the managing editor and then the editor in chief of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, and he owned the North American Review, which he brought with him to Harper. He instituted fiscal reforms, such as replacing hand compositors with linotype machines and inducing most of the Harpers to resign. He also publicized aggressively, most famously by throwing gala birthday dinners for the star house authors Mark Twain (1835–1910) and William Dean Howells (1837–1920). In 1913 Harvey sold Harper's Weekly to S. S. McClure and Harper's Bazar to William Randolph Hearst, where the spelling of the name was changed to Harper's Bazaar in 1929. But even such comparatively modern management did not bring profitability; in 1908, for example, Harper had book sales of over $900,000 but still lost more than $100,000. In 1915 the company's treasurer, C. T. Brainard, replaced Harvey as president. The ensuing cutbacks cost Harper some of its authors, most notably Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis.

HARPER'S AUTHORS

Not surprisingly Harper published numerous prominent writers of the period, especially in the periodicals. Charles Dudley Warner, Twain's collaborator on The Gilded Age (1873), was a prolific Harper contributor, as were Constance Fenimore Woolson, Margaret Deland, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and John Kendrick Bangs.Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur (1880) was a blockbuster for Harper, but the $100,000 they agreed to pay for his next novel, The Prince of India (1893), hastened their impending bankruptcy. Works confronting social issues included Helen Hunt Jackson's A Century of Dishonor (1881), John Hay's The Bread-Winners (1884), and Henry Demarest Lloyd's Wealth against Commonwealth (1894). In the early twentieth century Harper published Woodrow Wilson's A History of the American People (1902), Theodore Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt (1911) and The Financier (1912), and Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) as well as books by Mrs. Humphry Ward, O. Henry, Booth Tarkington, Hamlin Garland, and H. G. Wells. An interesting measure of Harper's literary reach was The Whole Family (1908), a composite novel by twelve authors including Howells, Freeman, and Henry James. James's Washington Square (1881) and The Ambassadors (1903) were Harper books, and despite privately disdaining magazines, he contributed often to Harper's periodicals. However, Harper also offended James by ignoring his synopsis of The Ambassadors for two years and later by making major mistakes in The American Scene (1907).

After his own publishing ventures led to bankruptcy in 1894, Twain became Harper's most famous author. Harper began its uniform New Library edition of Twain's works in 1897; by 1914, Harvey claimed, Twain and his heirs had been paid over $300,000. Twain's friend Howells had the most extensive connections to Harper. In 1885, in the prime of his career, he signed a contract that made him a virtual literary trademark for the house. The contract paid Howells $10,000 a year for the serial rights to his new works, a royalty on book sales, and $3,000 a year to write the "Editor's Study" column for Harper's Magazine. After Howells left this contract in 1891 and concluded the "Editor's Study" in March 1892, Harper continued publishing most of his serials and all of his books. In 1901 he returned as a literary adviser and began to write the "Editor's Easy Chair," which he continued until his death in 1920.

HARPER'S ARTISTS

Artists also played a major role in Harper's success. Winslow Homer was a war correspondent for Harper and frequently contributed illustrations thereafter. Charles Parsons (1821–1910), who directed the art department from 1863 until 1889—the great age of American magazine illustration—personally mentored young artists such as Nast, Edwin A. Abbey, Edward Windsor Kemble (Twain's illustrator for Huckleberry Finn and other works), Frederic Remington, Howard Pyle, and William Allen Rogers. Charles Stanley Reinhart was another prolific and respected Harper artist. In Picture and Text (1893) Henry James considered illustrators on their artistic merits; he particularly admired Abbey and Reinhart. Remington and Pyle were Harper writers as well as artists, as was George Du Maurier, whose novel Trilby (1894) was credited with increasing the circulation of Harper's New Monthly Magazine by 100,000, and who was James's illustrator for Washington Square.

The development of halftone photoengraving in the 1880s ended the competitive advantage of this fine art department. Halftones enabled photographs to be printed, bypassing the need for expensive illustration by fine-line wood engraving. The Bazar began using halftones in 1891, and soon thereafter the new ten-cent monthlies—notably McClure's, Cosmopolitan, Munsey's, and Ladies' Home Journal—exploited halftones and other innovations to revolutionize the magazine industry again.

HARPER'S INFLUENCE

The Gilded Age House of Harper is often associated with genteel culture and Victorian mores. Certainly its founders were pious, they valued character and industriousness, and they respected business unquestioningly. Their sons inherited from them the conviction that publishers were cultural guardians. In comparison to the robber barons of other industries or the publishing entrepreneurs of the Progressive Era, leaders of the House of Harper prided themselves on maintaining traditions. This self-image was later institutionalized by George Harvey's promotion of the reorganized firm's literary prestige and by subsequent memoirs and house histories. From the beginning, ironically, Harper used modern mass advertising to emphasize the house's traditional values. However, Harper also constructed new class relationships for readers and writers, developed mixed-gender literary spaces, pioneered the use of mass images, and emphasized the churning, urban, commercial "civilization" of its New York milieu. This combination of intellectual tradition and innovative literary commerce constitutes Harper's real historical influence.

See alsoBook Publishing; Houghton Mifflin; Literary Marketplace

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Abbott, Jacob. The Harper Establishment: How Books Are Made. New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2001. A visitor's guide first published by Harper & Brothers in 1855 after the firm moved into new quarters on Franklin Square; originally subtitled How the Story Books Are Made.

Harper, J. Henry. The House of Harper: A Century of Publishing in Franklin Square. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912.

Secondary Works

Exman, Eugene. The House of Harper: One Hundred andFifty Years of Publishing. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.

Hewitt, Rosalie. "Henry James, the Harpers, and TheAmerican Scene." American Literature 55, no. 1 (1983): 41–47.

Howard, June. Publishing the Family. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001.

Madison, Charles Allan. Book Publishing in America. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966.

Mott, Frank Luther. Golden Multitudes: The Story of BestSellers in the United States. New York: Bowker, 1947.

Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines. 5 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938–1968.

Sheehan, Donald. This Was Publishing: A Chronicle of theBook Trade in the Gilded Age. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1952.

Tebbel, John. A History of Book Publishing in the UnitedStates. 4 vols. New York: Bowker, 1972–1981. Vol. 1, The Creation of an Industry, 1630–1865, and vol. 2, The Expansion of an Industry, 1865–1919, are especially pertinent to the present essay.

Wilson, Christopher P. The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

Gib Prettyman