The New York Times Book Review: 125 Years of Literary History

On October 10, 1896, the Book Review became the newspaper of the rapidly expanding book world, The Literary Digest proclaimed in a 1919 piece celebrating Francis W. Halsey, the Book Review’s first editor.A paraphrase of The Times motto, ‘All the news that’s fit to print,’ would have described the Book Review,‘All the books that are fit to be read.’

It was the age of Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, Edith Wharton, William Butler Yeats. In his history of the Book Review, Francis Brown noted, It was a period of ferment, of individuality…and while the Book Review did not interpret the period as a whole in the sense of answering the why and the how, it did answer the what by reflecting and recording temper and mood.

The Book Review—which started at eight pages—exploded in size during its first 25 years. Often it was 32 pages; for special issues—such as holiday issues—it was as many as 56. Its basic format did not change until 1911, when there were two important developments. First, publication moved from Saturday to Sunday with the hopes that it will be read with more thoughtful attention…when the subscriber is free from the cares and demands of weekday vocations. And second, the lead review began appearing regularly on the front page.

In 1920, the Book Review merged with The New York Times Magazine, an experiment that ended abruptly two years later.

OCTOBER 10, 1896 | FRONT PAGE

The First Issue

The eight-page inaugural issue of The New York Times Saturday Book Review Supplement, dated October 10, 1896, featured news stories on the cover—including Oscar Wilde’s Forlorn State, about the author’s suffering in jail, and one that should sound familiar: It was about how book sales at department stores were threatening independent bookstores.

There were 10 reviews. The one of One Day’s Courtship and the Heralds of Fame began, Mr. Robert Barr is a reasonably ingenious, versatile, fairly well informed writer, and frequently an irritating one. Of Emile Richebourg’s La Jolie Dentellière, the critic offered what was clearly an insult: This novel belongs to the class—a very large class—of French novels that seem to be written with a view to the stage as their ultimate destination. (The equivalent, perhaps, to a reviewer today noting derisively that a book reads like a movie treatment.)

There was also a piece that derided the use of cliché in fiction, lists of publishers’ forthcoming titles, news of magazine articles, a page on art-world doings and a rather strange little piece reprinted from The London Standard—perhaps used to fill extra space—that had absolutely nothing to do with books or literature. Science Has Neglected Eggs was about keeping eggs fresh. The egg problem seems one that might advantageously be taken up by those interested in developing poultry and eggs as a domestic industry.

In Notoriety by Negation—reprinted from a British journal called The Saturday Review—an unnamed critic took a few vicious swipes at the popular novelist Marie Corelli. The Times noted the critic’s savagely contemptuous tone, adding that the motto of The Saturday Review seems to be ‘Anything to give pain.’

All of the Book Review’s early issues were, as Elmer Davis explained in History of The New York Times, 1851–1921, printed "in the form of loose sheets, folded into the rest of the paper. Those who didn’t care to carry the Book Review about with them—they rarely failed to ‘look over’ it—let it blow away in the wind, so one morning the management of The Times was attracted, and rather aggrieved, by a cartoon in Life entitled ‘The Littery Supplement,’ and depicting a citizen desperately trying to struggle out of an elevated station through a heap of discarded sheets of The Times Saturday Book Review."

JUNE 19, 1897 | EDITOR’S NOTE

Things to Avoid in Book Plates

Here the Book Review weighed in, a trifle pompously, on book plates, advising against comic or grim designs.

Very much has been written

about book plates in the sense of regarding them as bits of paper to be stuck into volumes, their adhesiveness as proprietary labels being dwelt upon to the exclusion of their artistic quality. A man having a library is supposably endowed with some literary taste. When he puts his plate into a book he not alone indicates proprietorship, but the idea is suggested that his volumes are to be preserved.

Though a person may be fastidious to his visiting card, he often shows indifference to the quality of his book plate. In selecting a subject for your ex libris, you may follow somewhat your own fancy, inclining toward heraldic emblems, if you please, but beware of comicalities. It is nothing less than lèse-majesté to put a comicality, with your name under it, on a grave, honest and dignified book. Punning book plates are worse than poster ones.

When you have decided what you want, consult an artist. He will, if he knows his business, simplify or bring out clearer your idea. Above all, eschew careless incapable engravers or etchers. Art is always poor when it is cheap. Remember that a book plate perpetuates as nothing else will coarseness and crudity.

There is a tendency of late (Germanic, possibly) to be gruesome in the composition of a book plate. So skeletons and death’s heads from Danse Macabre have been copied. This illustrated pessimism is in bad taste. Life is worth living because there are books, and so let us open a tome with a happy thought, even if it were written by Schopenhauer.

APRIL/MAY 1898 | LETTERS

Can Any of Your Readers Furnish Me With a List of Books?

The Book Review began running letters soon after its first issue in 1896, but these usually arrived in a trickle, with one or two tacked at the bottom of a page where space permitted.

By 1898, though, correspondence had exploded, and the letters section, called Comment and Query (the query portion was soon spun off into its own page), sometimes filled two pages. It was the internet message board of its day, lively and topical and bristling with opinions. Debates about books and reviews could—and often did—rage for months.

When there wasn’t any simmering controversy, the editor posed questions to generate discussion. For example, on December 31, 1898, in a note affixed to the top of the letters page, he invited readers to submit their lists of the best short stories ever written, saying he would be glad to hear from them.

The letters page also served as a recommendation engine: From the very beginning, people wrote in seeking literary inspiration from fellow readers, who were only too happy to oblige.

To The Editor:

Can any of your readers furnish me with a list of books suitable for working girls, that would be good from a moral and not too poor from a literary point of view, and yet exciting enough to interest them? I confess I don’t think they would appreciate Jane Austen, and yet I don’t care to try Marie Corelli or Rider Haggard. If any of your readers could make any suggestions on the subject, they would greatly oblige.

A READER OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

New York, April 16, 1898

I would like to make a few suggestions in response to the inquiry regarding books for working girls.

I presume the inquirer had in mind books of fiction in which the action is quick and interesting and free from much philosophizing, or short stories, and given that the taste of the working girls in question has not been too much spoiled by a diet of Family Story Paper, I see no reason why there should not be a large and choice variety for them to select from. There are Betty Alden, by Jane G. Austin, and The Green Door, by Mary E. Wilkins; also Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, and Conan Doyle’s Refugees.

Nearly all the titles given are of books read by myself before the age of 14, and I judge from the pleasure and food for reflection they afforded that they might be suitable to the intellect of the average working girl.

S.S.G.

East Orange, N.J., May 4, 1898

I think that A Reader of The New York Times, whose letter appeared in the issue of April 23, will find Ramona, In the Golden Days, All Sorts and Conditions of Men, A Singular Life and Rudder Grange exciting enough to interest working girls.

The working girls to whom I read aloud Rudder Grange confessed that it was the first book they ever listened to without going to sleep. Their interest was unabated and they never failed to be present while the story lasted. Probably Stockton’s other writings would have equally attracted them, but the readings were brought to an unexpected close. Surely it is something to bring amusement and brightness into dull lives.

There are, of course, working girls and working girls, and some of them may see nothing in Rudder Grange, as some of us can find nothing satisfactory in Rider Haggard or Marie Corelli.

A FRIEND OF THE WORKERS

New York, May 1, 1898

In making a selection for working girls, it is wise to bear in mind that a considerable percentage of them read with pleasure and appreciation novels every bit as good from a literary standpoint as do the girls in higher walks of life. I have in mind a cashier in a retail Avenue A butcher’s shop who reads no novels at all but English literature and history, a packer at Macy’s who reads only good poetry, a saleslady at Wanamaker’s who reads purpose novels, a cigarette girl who reads constantly such authors as Thackeray, William Morris, Walter Besant.

EDWIN WHITE GAILLARD

Librarian, Webster Free Library

New York, May 12, 1898

Early Book Review Headlines That Didn’t Mince Words

JUNE 18, 1898 | OUCH!

George Bernard Shaw, Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant

In the beginning, only some reviews were signed—the ones by well-known critics and scholars. In 1905, the editor noted that the annual holiday issue was remarkable for the large number of valuable contributions…from writers of eminence in their respective fields. This practice, however, was the exception, not the norm; unnamed pundits regularly took potshots at authors, poets and dramatists, some of whom began writing directly to the paper’s publisher, Adolph Ochs, asking that he intercede on their behalf. Ochs’s replies were courteous but firm. I should be pleased to have notice taken of your book, he wrote to one Mr. Miller in 1901. Of course in such matters, as you will readily understand, I do not interfere; in fact cannot do so without totally demoralizing our organization. Our high standing as to the literary character of The Times is due to the utmost freedom given for the honest expression of the opinion of the writers.

This review of George Bernard Shaw’s plays, though, later caused quite a stir, probably because it crossed the line from honest expression to mean-spiritedness.

Mr. Shaw is always smart

and glib, and he is not more demoniac or less human in any one of these plays, as a whole, than in another. They are all readable, if one likes to read Shaw’s stuff, and for the sake of good measure he has written a long introduction to each volume, in which he sets forth again in his fluent, showy way, his barren philosophy and his unbounded self-esteem. He has not a touch of the poetical in his composition, and the critic and satirist who is not a bit of a poet cannot reasonably hope to win wide renown as a dramatist.

Of course, this criticism, and any other that may conceivably be made against these pieces, has been discounted, as the phrase goes, by the author in his preface, wherein he proclaims his own artistic and literary kinship with the great. But this clever, voluble jack-of-all-trades…cannot be judged by his own comic standards when he puts his wares in the open market.

Mr. Shaw’s new book is one which a multitude of readers would find intolerably dry. The moral of Widowers’ Houses they would fail to comprehend. There are two or three passages in The Philanderer that seem capital burlesque. Probably a plumber’s assistant would laugh at them if they were read aloud to him. Mrs. Warren’s Profession has an unspeakable subject and the details of the story are unlikely. This play is too harsh and repellent, too bitter in its view of life, too dry and inconsequential to be acted.

A smart bit of historical perversion is called The Man of Destiny, and its subject is a supposed incident in the life of Napoleon. This shows, as some scenes in The Devil’s Disciple (acted here last winter, but as yet unpublished) show, that Shaw has the instinct of stagecraft and the knack of devising situations, and that if he had a poet’s gift he might become a real dramatist.

A striking portrait of the author serves as frontispiece in Vol. 1. His face is long and narrow, the brow high, the eyes shifty, the nose large, broad and blunt at the tip, the hair and beard scant Not a handsome man, surely and one who, except for the oddity of his dress and his views, and the unusual opportunities he has enjoyed to publicly exhibit both, would never have attracted much notice. And, to conclude, it should be borne in mind that there are ten thousand men and women in America and England writing smart, partly original, wholly unactable plays.

Mr. Shaw’s new book is one which a multitude of readers would find intolerably dry.

Shaw on February 3, 1889.

In 1902, The Times reported that Mark Twain does a good deal of his work in bed, adding that the author once scolded a group of writers complaining about the difficulties of creative work. Writing is the easiest thing in the world, he told them. Just try it in bed sometime.I sit up with a pipe in my mouth and a board on my knees, and I scribble away. Thinking is easy work, and there isn’t much labor in moving your fingers significantly to get the words down.

OCTOBER 15, 1898 | REVIEW

Henry James, The Two Magics

Sometimes the anonymous Book Review critics got it wrong; sometimes they got it very, very right. This assessment of the book that included The Turn of the Screw said of the horror novella, The very breath of hell seems to pervade some of its chapters.

Coming immediately on the heels,

as one may say, of his painfully elaborate treatment of an almost worthless subject in a story called In the Cage, this newer volume by Mr. James is doubly gratifying. We should not care, certainly, to recommend it offhand as agreeable reading for habitually light-hearted or light-minded persons, though, to be sure the second of the two stories which make up its contents, Covering End, is a perfect example of pure comedy.

But it is to the longer tale that we desire to direct attention. The Turn of the Screw is such a deliberate, powerful, and horribly successful study of the magic of evil, and of the subtle influence over human hearts and minds of the sin with which this world is accursed, as our language has not produced since Stevenson wrote his Jekyll and Hyde tale.

Mr. James’s story is perhaps as allegorical as Stevenson’s, but the allegory is not so clear. We have called it horribly successful, and the phrase seems to still stand to express the awful, almost overpowering sense of evil that human nature is subject to derived from it by the sensitive reader. We have no doubt that with such a reader Mr. James will invariably produce the effect he aims at. But the work is not horrible in any grotesque or realistic sense. The most affecting argument against sin we have lately encountered in literature, it is nevertheless free from the slightest hint of grossness. Yet while the manner of his story is always graceful, the very breath of hell seems to pervade some of its chapters.

Just what the story is would be unfair to divulge here, but a boy of 10 and a girl of 8 figure in it prominently, and they are so lovely in their outward semblance of childlike innocence. Yet these children are accursed, and are shown to have daily, almost hourly, communication with lost souls, the souls that formerly inhabited the bodies of a vicious governess and her paramour who, in the flesh, began the degradation of their victims. The awful imagination of evil this fair boy and girl must possess, the terrible precocity which enables them to deceive their pastors and masters as to their knowledge of their ghostly mentors, are set with perfect clearness against the narrative to produce the thrilling effect.

A Christmas house party, with ghost stories told around the fireplace, develops The Turn of the Screw in a tale of a ghost seen first by an innocent child, and this leads to the production of this ghost story read from the faded manuscript of a gentlewoman who had had experiences with the possessed children. The style of the manuscript, in spite of the insistence upon the woman’s penmanship, is obviously the style of Mr. Henry James. But one appreciates not the less the touch in the statement that it was read with a fine clearness that was like a rendering to the ear of the beauty of the author’s hand.

‘The Turn of the Screw’ is such a deliberate, powerful, and horribly successful study of the magic of evil.

A portrait of James published in The Times in 1916.

MAY 20, 1899 | LETTER

Your Worship of Kipling

In his reply to a somewhat cranky missive, the editor of the Book Review laid out its basic philosophy.

To The New York Times Saturday Review:

Is there never to be any let up in your worship of Kipling? I can put up with a considerable amount of that sort of thing, but you have brought it close to a state of nausea—and if, as I conjecture, Kipling is not hopelessly conceited, he must be nigh sickening of it himself.

TIMES READER

May 15, 1899

The editor responds:

Although the above note is anonymous, this need not diminish the force of the appeal contained in it. The editor has, in fact, concluded to violate the ancient rule not to notice anonymous correspondence and accordingly gives Times Reader a hearing. Times Reader will be glad to know that the present number of The Saturday Review has been prepared with a special desire to please him (or her). So far as our most eagleish eye has determined, this present number of The Saturday Review does not contain a single article about Kipling, save of course the present, and for this Times Reader will not blame the editor. But it will be impossible to give Times Reader any guarantee of future immunity from Kipling. The Saturday Review must give the news of books. Its topics must be timely. Otherwise it would not remain long alive. The editor seriously hopes that Times Reader desires to see The Saturday Review continue its existence for many years. Times Reader is a candid friend, the kind of friend the editor likes to hear from. But these friends should always extend their candor one point further. They should send their names with their friendly admonitions.

Later

The above had been scheduled for a Kiplingless paper, and had been written in perfect good faith, when, late yesterday afternoon, there came to the editor news he had long had an inkling of but could not print until now—news of Mr. Kipling’s new edition of his works. This seemed to us a most important piece of news and could not possibly be held over. Will Times Reader please pardon us—or at least credit us with good intentions? And will he not understand that an editor, who aims to print the news, is far from being a free agent?

DECEMBER 23, 1899 | EDITOR’S NOTE

How a Christmas Classic Came to Be

The Book Review often reprinted Clement C. Moore’s famous poem during the holiday season. In 1899, it published this brief history, which drew a fascinating reply from a reader.

The merry Christmas season always

awakens fresh reference to the name of another who quite by accident made the whole Christian world his debtor. Clement C. Moore, a man of profound learning, earned worldwide and enduring fame as the author of A Visit From St. Nicholas, more familiarly called The Night Before Christmas. No poem written by an American has had so wide a circulation or been translated into so many languages. The human spirit beats in it, the true Christmas spirit pervades it, and it will be dear to the hearts of children as long as children continue to hang their stockings on Christmas Eve—and may that beautiful custom never die out!

Moore, who gave this old Dutch legend its poetic form, was born (July 15, 1779), reared and spent practically all his days in this city. His father had a stately mansion, a house that stood on a hill where the east side of Ninth Avenue, between Twenty-second and Twenty-third Streets, now is. It commanded a magnificently extensive view of the river and beyond, and the land was terraced to the water’s edge.

Moore devoted his life to the education of young men for the ministry. He became Professor of Greek and Oriental Literature in the Episcopal Theological Seminary. As a relaxation from his serious work, Dr. Moore amused himself by writing stories and verses for the entertainment of his children, and The Night Before Christmas was written to aid their jollification while celebrating the holiday season of 1822.

A young lady from Troy, while on a visit to the home of Dr. Moore, saw the verses, and was so pleased with them that she begged the privilege of making a copy of them to show her friends at home. The following year, without consulting Dr. Moore, she sent the poem to the editor of the Troy Sentinel, in which it was printed on Dec. 23, 1823. The pleasure with which it was received, and the popularity which it immediately secured, mollified the good doctor’s displeasure over its publication.

On July 10, 1863, Dr. Moore died at his summer home in Newport, R.I., at the ripe old age of 84 years. His place in the affections of his fellow men is secure as long as there is a pair of childish lips to murmur that happy closing line in his poetic version of the jolly old Dutch legend of The Visit of St. Nicholas:

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

A week later, the Book Review printed a reply from a reader:

It is not so long ago that Clement C. Moore’s old residence in New York’s Chelsea was torn down. I remember it well. The whole block bounded by Twenty-second and Twenty-third Streets and Ninth and Tenth Avenues was, as late as 1855, a hill, with high stone walls supporting it on the street and avenue sides. I used to take my sled up in front of the old mansion and slide downhill, out at the northwest corner of Twenty-second and Ninth. That was the mansion in which The Visit of St. Nicholas was written. And those were the days before horse cars, when omnibuses ran in summer and big stage-sleighs in winter, for the snow stayed on the ground weeks at a time. I saw that old hill dug down and carted away, and that winter, 1856 I think it was, the rain collected and froze in the excavations and I skated there. But I will say no more, or I shall ramble too long and too far.

GEORGE W. VAN SICLEN

The night before Christmas, 1899

DECEMBER 7, 1901 | REVIEW

Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition

Our reviewer found this fictional account of the rise of the white supremacy movement and the Wilmington insurrection of 1898 to be too bitter in places but conceded he was likely far from impartial.

Mr. Charles W. Chesnutt formed

his style and tested his strength in writing stories such as might be supposed to please his white readers and to place them in the attitude declared by Dr. Johnson to be correct when considering the performance of the dancing bear, but with The House Behind the Cedars he took a new stand and began to exhibit the darkness of the educated black man’s lot, the hopelessness encompassing him, the dismal fate sure sooner or later to overtake him.

In his The Marrow of Tradition, published this week, he pursues the same policy, but the action includes an entire town and a large family connection, thus having a much wider scope than the former novel. The chief actors are white, and the main object of the story is to exhibit the deterioration in character and conduct caused by the effort to oppress the negro. The suffering of the dark race is made manifest also, but the book closes leaving the moral victory with them. The negro question, says Mr. Chesnutt, will trouble the American Government and the American conscience until a sustained effort is made to settle it upon principles of justice.

He shows his readers a mulatto physician, brilliant in his profession, the founder of a hospital, a good citizen, unimpeachable in any way, excluded from consultation because of his color. He shows the doctor’s wife, the legitimate daughter of a mulatto and a white man, deprived of her inheritance and of her name by white women who conceived themselves to be doing their duty to their family and to society by suppressing her father’s will. He shows a negro accused of a crime which he knows to be the work of a white man, but suppressing his knowledge and facing the terrors of lynching that his silence may possibly save the life of his former master, to whom the truth would be fatal. He shows white men planning to change the laws made during the Reconstruction period and allowing themselves to be led into falsehood, even into perjury, rather than tell the truth under the circumstances which would make them ludicrous in the eyes of the negroes. Last of all, the natural result of the forces set at work in the earlier chapters, he shows a town given over to bloodshed and terror, in the midst of which two who have most cruelly wronged the negroes are compelled to humiliate themselves before two of the despised race.

The book is skillfully written, and although certain occasional touches seem too bitter, or quite unfair, who shall say that to an impartial reader, to a Hindu or Chinese critic, they might not seem entirely impartial? They are certainly indications of feeling among the best class of negroes among whom the white men of the South should find allies in the task of justly and fairly settling the negro question.

Fiction has been so powerful an element in the relations of the North and the South that it cannot be neglected in contemplating the condition and prospects of the section, and Mr. Chesnutt’s book should receive as much attention in the South as was given to Red Rock in the North. The two deal with persons of widely differing character, but neither pretends to generalize. Mr. Page’s martyr doctor who gave his life to save that of a negro criminal, and Mr. Chesnutt’s mulatto physician, his only son slain by a rioter’s bullet, would understand one another. The two books should bring together men of their mind and spirit.

The main object of the story is to exhibit the deterioration in character and conduct caused by the effort to oppress the negro.

Chesnutt writes in the library of his home in Cleveland, Ohio, May 1904.

JANUARY 18, 1902 | OP-ED

Why Miss Alcott Still Lives

When Little Women was first published in 1868, the paper’s reviewer wrote, "While occupied with something far graver and less agreeable, we pushed Little Women quietly within the reach of two younger critics, and soon had them silent for a time. The book met with the children’s approval: You ought to read it, though!" they said.

Nothing changes the child. Born

into an age of iron, an age of steam, or an age of electricity, he is precisely the same, with the same primal reversion to ancestral tastes. He will read stories of war and hunting, and will long to use a wicked gun; he must pass through the barbaric period.

So must his sister, but for her the stories of the human giant and fairy are substituted. The human giant, the girl of 5 or 6 who performs all the household work of her father’s small establishment; the domestic fairy, who bestows good gifts upon her entire family by charming an aged millionaire, or a dying miser, or an alienated grandparent, or a long exiled third cousin, are always favorite with girls.

It is because Miss Alcott ministered to the phase of childish feeling that her books have so long held sway among American girls, and it is small wonder that the appearance of two as plays and of one with 15 clever pictures sets them among the chief favorites of the holiday season.

Yet, looking merely at their incidents and at the characters of their small personages, one is puzzled to see why they should be longer lived than a hundred ephemerals which have opened their wings to flutter about the Christmas candles and closed them to fall into forgotten slumbers. Their success is one of the strongest illustrations afforded by juvenile literature than, in art as in life, it is above all character that counts. Miss Alcott, as all the world knows, grew to her noble womanhood in a home which surpassed in quaintness anything which she would or could describe. She and her sisters had every opportunity to perform giant labors, and all manner of uses for fairy wands, and she, the strongest and the cleverest, found need for all her strength and cleverness, and when she wrote of the March family she merely described life as she knew it.

As Scotland to Burns and Sir Walter, as courts to Metternich, such was a New England home with plenty of nothing but love and courage to her. She had no need to rectify and enlarge, to cull anecdotes from the records of children. She had only to unveil the mirror of her