Publishers Weekly April 19, 2022

When it came time to pick the editor to oversee our 150th anniversary issue, the choice was easy. I had worked with Michael Coffey from the time I joined PW in 1993 until Michael’s retirement in 2014. For five of those years we served as co-editorial directors, as Michael, with the soul of a poet (which he is), headed up PW’s more literary efforts, while I focused more on the business side of publishing. I always thought we were a good team and that impression was solidified by Michael’s work on this issue, one of the biggest and most ambitious we have ever done. The success of the issue is a tribute to his vision, dedication, and leadership.…

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year, and an important factor in its longevity has been its ability to serve all aspects of the publishing community. That community has changed over the years and in many ways has broadened. One reason the publication was originally called The Publishers’ and Stationers’ Weekly Trade Circular was because it featured a listing of the books that publishers were preparing to release either on their own or through book dealers. Publishers, if not stationers, remain key players in a publishing community that now also includes bricks-and-mortar bookstores (both independents and a few chains), online bookstores, distributors, authors, agents, libraries, book manufacturers, fair organizers, and digital vendors, not to mention international counterparts for whom the U.S. market is important. It is indeed a big…

WHEN I WAS INVITED to be the editor of PW’s 150th anniversary issue, I first turned to the five other quarter-century milestone anniversary issues—from 1897, 1922, 1947, 1972, and 1997—as a quick way to refamiliarize myself with the breadth of this magazine at which I had spent 26 years, the heart of my professional life. It is not that I had left PW—one seldom does, I had heard, and now stand in evidence thereof—for even in the years since my 2014 retirement, I have been a subscriber and kept abreast of the industry (and the doings of former colleagues). But in looking at the most recent anniversary issue, the 125th from 1997, an issue I had worked on closely, I saw an industry that, though recognizable, was truly of another…

MAGAZINES ARE MANY THINGS. They are heralds and historians, communicating (and occasionally even foreshadowing) history as it is being made and, in the process, becoming a repository for it. They are educational enterprises, circulated in order to inform; fiscal enterprises, monetized for sustainability and for profit; and objets d’art, designed to be held and admired. They aspire to objectivity in their records, yet also deliver the subjective by way of criticism and columns of opinion. They are printed and bound in paper, a product of the cellulose fibers derived from dead plants, but issue by issue, they grow and mature, changing their positions and purposes. They have lifetimes, however metaphorical those may be. Over the course of 150 years—an inarguably impressive lifetime—Publishers Weekly has grown from a weekly trade circular edited…

1912 •Publishers Weekly Consensus, our first original bestseller list, debuts (before that, we had published syndicated lists from the Bookman). 1917 •Lists separated into Fiction (F) and Nonfiction (NF), when WWI brings increased interest in the latter. •U.S. enters WWI. Mr. Britling Sees It Through by H.G. Wells, a novel about WWI, is the #1 F title that year. 1919 •Prohibition enacted, women’s suffrage passed. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, a novel about WWI, is the #1 F title that year. 1921 •First radio baseball broadcast and Tulsa, Okla., massacre. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, a reflection on WWI and Prohibition, is the #1 F title for 1921, and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton is the #4 F title. 1925 •Scopes monkey trial is decided in Tennessee on July 21. Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis, a novel dealing…

1 Alone in Space: A Collection by Tillie Walden 9781910395585 $32.95 | hardcover | 320p | 2021 Avery Hill Publishing Dreamy autobiographical comics from 2x Eisner award winner. 2 Astrology: A Cosmic Science by Isabel M. Hickey 9780916360634 $22.95 | paper | 356p | 2011 CRCS Publications The timeless work, with a Foreword by Stephen Arroyo. 3 Barefoot Gen Volume 1: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima by Keiji Nakazawa 9780867196023 $16.95 | paper | 288p | 2004 Last Gasp “Invaluable for the lessons it offers…” —Publishers Weekly 4 Be a Survivor: Your Guide To Breast Cancer Treatment by Vladimir Lange, MD 9780692177242 $24.95 | paper | 180p | 2018 Lange Productions The first guide to reach for when navigating your new diagnosis. 5 Beyond the Dark Veil by Jack Mord 9780867197969 $29.95 | hardcover | 200p | 2014 Last Gasp Post mortem and mourning photos from The Thanatos Archive. 6 Blaxploitation Cinema: The Essential Reference Guide by Josiah Howard 9781903254370 $29.95 | hardcover…