Publishers Weekly
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents. Published continuously for the past 136 years, it has carried the tagline, "The International News Magazine of Book Publishing and Bookselling." With 51 issues a year, the emphasis today is on book reviews.
First published in 1872, the magazine began as The Publishers' Weekly (with an apostrophe), a collective catalog for publishers to pool their resources. That listing of books enabled booksellers to learn about forthcoming titles, and eventually the publication expanded to include features and articles.
Through much of the 20th century, the magazine was guided and developed by Frederic Gershom Melcher (1879-1963), who was editor and co-editor of Publishers' Weekly and chairman of the magazine's publisher, R. R. Bowker, over four decades. Born April 12, 1879, in Malden, Massachusetts, Melcher began at age 16 in Boston's Estes & Lauriat Bookstore, moving to Indianapolis in 1913 for another bookstore job. In 1918, he read in Publishers' Weekly that the magazine's editorship was vacant. He applied to Richard Rogers Bowker for the job, was hired and moved with his family to Montclair, New Jersey. When Bowker died in 1933, Melcher succeeded him as president of the company, resigning in 1959 to become chairman of the board of directors.
