“Mr. Farrar has turned The Bookman into a monthly brimming with his own creative enthusiasm,” says Louis Untermeyer. “It has technically as well as figuratively no rival.”
And Irvin S. Cobb declares: “By my way of thinking, it is the most informative, the most entertaining, and incidentally the brightest and most amusing publication devoted to literature and its products that I have ever seen.”
ii
The idea of The Bookman Foundation first occurred in a discussion of the future of the magazine and the ampler purposes it was desired to have The Bookman serve. The idea had been advanced that more than the future of the magazine should be considered; those to whom the welfare of the magazine was a most important consideration distinctly felt that welfare to depend upon a healthy and thriving condition of American literature and of American interest in American literature. The broadest possible view, as is so often the case, seemed the only ultimately profitable view. In what way could The Bookman serve the interests of American literature in which it was not already serving them? How could public interest in American literature best be stimulated?
The idea gradually took shape as a form of foundation, naturally to be called The Bookman Foundation, with a double purpose. Fundamentally The Bookman Foundation is being established to stimulate the study of American literature and its development; more immediately, and as the direct means to that end, the purpose of the Foundation will be to afford a vehicle for the best constructive criticism, spoken and written, on the beginnings and development of our literature. In association with the faculty of English at one of the larger and older American universities, Yale, the Foundation will establish a lectureship; and annually there will be given at Yale a lecture or a course of lectures on American literature by some distinguished writer or critic. It is hoped that, as the Foundation grows, other universities will be brought into co-operation with Yale so that the lectureship may move from centre to centre, stimulating to intelligent self-expression the varied elements that are contributing to our national growth.
The lectures given on The Bookman Foundation will be published in book form by The Bookman in a handsome and uniform edition. Membership in The Bookman Foundation will be by invitation. All members of the Foundation will be entitled to receive the published lectures without charge and they will also have the privilege of subscribing for certain first and limited editions of notable American books. At the present writing, even so much as I have suggested is largely tentative, and I offer it for its essential idea; an executive committee of The Bookman Foundation, in co-operation with an advisory committee, the members of which committees have yet to be finally determined, will settle all details. By the time of this book’s publication or even sooner, I expect a full announcement will have been made; and for the correction of what I have stated I would refer the reader to The Bookman itself.
iii
I am not going to give a historical account of The Bookman here. The magazine is no newcomer among American periodicals. It has a reasonably old and highly honourable history. For long published by the house of Dodd, Mead & Company, it was acquired by George H. Doran Company and placed under the editorial direction of Robert Cortes Holliday. That was the beginning of a new vitality in its pages. Mr. Holliday was succeeded by Mr. Farrar, and now, in its fifty-sixth volume, The Bookman seems to the thousands who read it more interesting than ever before in its history.
The roll call of its past and present contributors includes many of the representative names in contemporary American and English literature. I will give a few: