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Among the American essayists whose work has appeared in The Bookman before its publication in book form is Robert Cortes Holliday; among strikingly successful books that appeared serially in The Bookman was Donald Ogden Stewart’s A Parody Outline of History. Among The Bookman’s regular reviewers are Louis Untermeyer, Wilson Follett, Paul Elmer More, H. L. Mencken, Henry Seidel Canby and Maurice Francis Egan. Among writers of distinction whose short stories have first appeared in The Bookman are William McFee, Sherwood Anderson, Mary Austin, and Johan Bojer; while the intimate personal portraits published under the general title “The Literary Spotlight” have Lytton Stracheyized contemporary American literature. Possibly it is in the department of poetry that The Bookman now shines the brightest (see the account of The Bookman Anthology in the previous chapter); if so, that may be because the editor, John Farrar, is himself a poet.
Probably no other literary magazine in the world exhibits such a degree of personal contact between the editor, his readers, his contributors and the magazine’s friends. This note of personal contact is constantly reflected in the magazine’s pages; but anyone who has called upon the editor of The Bookman once or twice will know explicitly just what I mean.
EPILOGUE
I have been surprised, on looking back over these chapters, by the variety of the books I have talked about. That so diverse a list should be under a single imprint and should represent, with few exceptions, the publications of a single twelvemonth, seems to me very remarkable. I believe a majority of the books are the production of a single publishing season, the autumn of 1922, and the Doran imprint is but thirteen years old.
“Of the making of books, there is no end”; but of the making of any single book, there must come an end. Yet what is the end of a book but the beginning of new friendships?