J. Henry Harper’s House of Harper, originally published in 1912, tells the story of the author’s industrious forefathers launching their publishing house in the early nineteenth century. According to J. Henry, firstborn James Harper left the family farm in Newtown, Long Island in December 1810 to be a printer’s apprentice in New York City. At the Paul and Thomas publishing house, James spent his time either “inking” (applying ink with hand-balls) or “pulling” (laying sheets and yanking them across the ink) alongside a partner at machines that had not evolved much since the days of his hero, Benjamin Franklin.
In March 1817, after James’s younger brother John completed a printing apprenticeship of his own, the two brothers opened a print shop called J. & J. Harper. John, 22, was a skilled compositor, and James, 20, an accomplished pressman. By August they had released their first title, Seneca’s Morals. In 1823, the third brother, Wesley, bought into the Harper publishing business, and the youngest brother, Fletcher (J. Henry’s grandfather), joined in 1825. That year, a mere eight since the house’s opening, the business became what J. Henry calls “the largest book-manufacturing establishment in the country.”[1]
The Harper & Brothers publishing house made its initial fortune by publishing primarily English novels, often spread across volumes in library series. The house began issuing such collections as early as 1830 with the “Family Library Series,” which contained 187 volumes.[2] Soon the Harper’s Boys and Girls’ Library and the Harper’s Library of Select Novels joined, allowing the house to reach “a public which wished to read fiction but which could not afford to pay the prices set on cloth- or leather-bound volumes.”[3]
The Harpers’ foray into schoolbook publishing proved to be another sizable source of revenue. In 1839, the Harper & Brother house won the contract to print books for the New York State School District Libraries. [4] The Harpers asserted their publishing house as a formidable producer of educational texts and as leading contributor to the movement towards improved education access. Professor Anthon’s Classical Series, for example, distributed classic works by Homer and Xenophon across the nation beginning in 1836. Extensive Latin and Greek lexicons and dictionaries pushed classical education agendas throughout the United States. Several history books, including a run by William H. Prescott about Central and South America in the mid-1840s, tapped into a growing demand for both the exotic and the educational. [5]
When the Harpers began their next publication medium—a monthly general interest magazine—in June of 1850, they relied on prior business experience from their successful endeavors in book publishing. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine was a place to find literature at a lower price point, much as the library series books were. The publication’s literary focus was a response to a growing demand for specific content from readers, periodical literature, much as the school books were in response to an increasing demand for educational materials.
Once again, market and audience awareness led the Harpers towards a prosperous publication. The number of printed Harper’s Monthly copies grew from 7,500 to 50,000 within the first six months and then climbed to 120,000 by the end of 1861.[6] Mott goes so far as to say that the founding of the first Harper & Brothers periodical was “the most definite epochal happening” between 1850 and 1865, for it affected “immediately and profoundly, the whole course of development of the American general magazine.”[7]
Bolstered by the great following garnered and financial success earned by Harper’s Monthly, the house launched another magazine in 1857: Harper’s Weekly, A Journal of Civilization. A full-page ad for Harper’s Weekly first ran in Harper’s Monthly in December 1856, including the full prospectus explaining its goals, function, and terms. This advertisement called Harper’s Weekly a “family newspaper,” and, with typical Harper flourish, said that its “cheerful and genial character will render it a welcome visitor to every household.”[8]
Keeping both Harper’s Monthly and Harper’s Weekly afloat during the Civil War was no small feat. The publishers remarkably managed to grow the periodicals, and after the war Fletcher wanted to start a third magazine modeled after the publication Der Bazar from Berlin. Der Bazar was a general interest publication not unlike the other Harper house magazines, but it included a healthy dose of fashion content—including elaborate woodcuts of fashions in posh European capitals like Paris, London, and Vienna—which neither Harper’s Monthly nor Harper’s Weekly expressly covered.
Fletcher believed that there was sufficient demand from middle- to upper-class women in the United States who formed a new leisure class and wanted a guide to living well in the modern world. The other Harper brothers were not moved by Fletcher’s idea. They felt they “already had their hands full and that they were too far advanced in years to undertake the launching of a new enterprise.” Fletcher only swayed them when he told them, “Well, I wish we could go into it as a firm, but if we cannot I will publish it myself.” John gave in, and Fletcher got to work on Harper’s Bazaar, a periodical that would prove profitable for the house and ultimately endure for over 150 years.[9]
The final periodical that the Harper House launched was Harper’s Young People, which debuted on Tuesday, November 4, 1879. Its pages measured nine by 12 inches and were handsomely illustrated, thanks to the publishing house’s fantastic art department. Annual subscriptions were $1.50, which a mere half of rival publishing house Scribner’s children’s periodical called St. Nicholas. The magazine published serial and short stories; ran pieces about science, history, culture, exercise, and more; featured stable, recurring sections including poems, riddles, jokes, and a correspondence column called “Our Post Office Box”; and, finally, closed with advertisements.
Click through each subsection to learn more about individual Harper publications.
Notes:
[1] J. Henry Harper, House of Harper: A Century of Publishing in Franklin Square (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1912; London: Forgotten Books, 2016), 8, 6, 15, 19, 22, 27. J. Henry’s bias demands that parts of The House of Harper be read with scrutiny, but his intimate knowledge of the house provides a valuable service.
[2] Harper, House of Harper, 63.
[3] John Gray Laird Dowgray, Jr., “A History of Harper’s Literary Magazines, 1850-1900” (PhD diss, University of Wisconsin, 1955), 18.
[4] As with the serialized libraries, the exact financial gain of the schoolbook publishing is unknown. J. Henry calls it “a rich harvest for Harper & Brothers” (p. 64). He also mentions that New York had $110,000 to spend each year for five years on textbooks; if all that went to Harper’s, it was no small boon (p. 64).
[5] Harper, House of Harper, 70-72, 137.
[6] Alfred Hudson Guernsey, “Making the Magazine,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December 1865, 2.
[7] Mott, American Magazines, 1850-1865, 472.
[8] “Harper’s Weekly. A Journal of Civilization,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December 1860.
[9] Harper, House of Harper, 253.
