George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher (review)

George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher. By Ezra Greenspan. University Park: Penn State Press, 2000. xv, 510 pp. $45.00. ISBN 0-271-02005-9.

In The School of Hawthorne, Richard Brodhead describes Horace Scudder, an advisor and editor at Houghton Mifflin Company from 1863 to his death in 1902, as "one of those nineteenth century figures who seem to have belonged simultaneously to the management of every literary and cultural institution, and also integrated their workings in practical terms" (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, 59). As this fine if occasionally digressive biography by Ezra Greenspan makes clear, the same must be said of George Palmer Putnam. Putnam—the founder of G. P. Putnam and Company and the publisher of Putnam's Monthly as well as important works by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Susan Warner—was not simply a central figure in the nineteenth-century American book and magazine trade. He was also a leader in the movement for international copyright (as one of the founding members of the American Copyright Club and, later, the International Copyright Association), the organizing force behind the New York Book Publishers Association, and one of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In short, writes Greenspan, Putnam was "one of the most centrally situated, broadly and multiply involved, and professionally and patriotically dedicated figures of his time in the world of American letters" (xiii).

Greenspan's biography, the first extended examination of Putnam since the turn of the twentieth century, offers a definitive account of this publisher's career. The chronicle of Putnam's work in London in the 1840s—when Putnam served simultaneously as publisher, freelance literary agent, institutional book buyer, and self-appointed promoter of American arts and letters—may be used as a primer on the workings of the Anglo-American book trade in the mid-nineteenth century. The chapter on Putnam's Monthly is similarly excellent and offers the most complete history of this short-lived but significant magazine to date.

The book is a bit too long. Greenspan intends not only to chronicle Putnam's career but also to portray the publisher's life and that of his family as a register of the multiform developments transforming life in nineteenth-century America. Greenspan thus includes a great deal of Putnam's personal and family history. Such detail, though fascinating in places, distracts from the central and most valuable part of this book: the account of Putnam's career and its importance.

We know much of the history of American publishing in the nineteenth century through a collection of extraordinary biographies and house histories: Ellen Ballou's The Building of the House (a history of Houghton Mifflin Company), Eugene Exman's The Brothers Harper and The House of Harper, and William Tryon's Parnassus Corner (a biography of James T. Fields). Greenspan's biography is a fine and necessary addition to this group, which provides the essential introduction to the American book trade in its formative era.