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This page, and directly linked pages, are a draft version of a website which is planned to index the lists of contributors and advertisers which appear in PTLA 1873-1947. The remainder of this page provides historical background on PTLA. To go to the years for which indexes are currently available, click here.
Publishers' Weekly began publication in New York City in 1872. As it still does today, PW carried news of interest to the trade, advertising, and descriptions of new publications.
It's editor, Frederick Leypoldt, intended, in part, to continue the work of Orville A. Roorbach whose Bibliotheca Americana cataloged American imprints from 1820 to 1861; James Kelly's The American Catalogue of Books (Original and Reprints) Published in the United States from Jan. 1861, to Jan. [1871], The American Catalogue of Books for 1871 [covering 1870]; and The American Catalogue [for 1871]. Leypoldt also continued the American Catalogue for 1876-1910 in eleven volumes published between 1876 and 1910.
Leypoldt started PTLA in 1873 as the basis on which a full catalog of United States imprints might eventually be founded. The titlepage of the second (1874) volume reads in full: The Publishers' Trade List Annual, Embracing the Full Trade Lists of American Publishers, together with an Alphabetical Reference List of Books recorded in the Publisher's Weekly from January 16, 1873, to June 27, 1874, and the American Educational Catalogue for 1874. With Alphabetical Indexes of Firms and Trade Specialities. New York: Office of the Publishers' Weekly, 37 Park Row. October, 1874.
Leypoldt's idea was straight-forward: ask every American publisher to submit by a specified date a specified number of copies of a catalog of their publications. Collate the resulting catalogs, provide some indices and other preliminary matter, and bind the result into a volume that could be distributed back to booksellers, libraries, and other potential book buyers and distributors. The call for submissions must have included general specifications on size: the volumes are relatively uniform, page size about 8 by 11 inches, but grow thicker with each passing year as both individual catalogs and the number of publishers submitting them grow larger. By 1900, the volumes are nearly a foot thick and unwieldy in the extreme. At the present time, the title comes in three or more volumes each year.
Content varies. Some catalogs were, and are, little more than lists with price and order information. Others offer substantial descriptions of individual books and series. Relatively few are illustrated in the 1870s; by the late 1880s, however, more and more are illustrated with line cuts and half-tones, often of bindings, later dustjackets, but also of authors, factory buildings, and manufacturing facilities. Paper quality varies but is, in general, not very good, and many runs are missing pages and portions of pages.
A second part of Leypoldt's idea was to index each year's PTLA to provide access to individual authors and titles. Although the H. W. Wilson Company began the Cummulative Book Index in 1898 and produced volumes of The United States Catalog in 1899, 1902, 1912, and 1928, Leypoldt's ambition was not realized until 1948, when PTLA became the source document for Books in Print.
Since relatively few publisher's catalogs survive, and those which do are widely scattered, PTLA is an invaluable resource for research of late 19th century imprints. During the 1970s, the Meckler Corporation published a microfiche edition of PTLA, 1903-1981. In 1994, the Guide to Microforms in Print priced this at $15,000. I have not been able to discover why the 1873-1902 volumes, highly valuable for all sorts of studies, were not selected for filming, and I do not know whose run was sacrificed for filming. The microfiche set lacks at least some pages. Meckler has since moved on to electronic products, and I do not know the current location of the master microfilm.
An informal survey in 1995-1997 conducted via the Exlibris listserv suggested that relatively complete runs for the pre-1920 volumes are far from common. Full or nearly full runs of PTLA have so far been identified at the American Antiquarian Society; The British Library; Brown University; University of California, Los Angeles; Cornell University; Emory University; University of Illinois; University of Indiana; University of Michigan; University of Minnesota; the Newberry Library; The New York State Library, and Rutgers. The University of California, Berkeley and Stanford divide a fairly long run. In the 1960s, the University of Iowa sent its run to the Center for Research Libraries, as did, one guesses, a number of other libraries.
Each volume of PTLA is prefaced by a single alphabetical list of publishers contributing catalogs and of publishers and others who chose to offer display advertisements in lieu of catalogs. It appears that most catalogs arrived in a timely way and were arranged in alphabetical order by name of publisher; a few, inevitably, arrived late and were placed in a supplement bound after the primary sequence. Advertisements might appear on the cover of the binding, on endsheets or preliminary pages, or on pages inserted after the supplement. The principal purpose of the index was to point to these various locations.
While catalogs seem to have been fairly consistently ordered by surname of publisher, the numerous cross-references suggest that a secondary purpose of the index was to help point readers to the filing point of publishers whose firm names were generally known to begin, for example, with initials or a name: H. M. Caldwell Co. to Caldwell, H. M., Co. or Orange Judd Co. to Judd, Orange, Co.
The index entries are thus of two kinds, either main entries or cross-references. The main entries contain only a few data elements: name of firm; often but far from always the city in which it was located; and the general location of its catalog or advertisement in the volume. In the cumulative index we have preserved name and city but not the location designation. This means that some publishers on our list may be represented by a single display advertisement (although the range of information in the catalogs themselves is itself unpredictably variable). The work required to reflect the amount of information to which a particular entry points would have been beyond our capacity in any case.
We began by photocopying the two-to-five page index of contributors and contributors that begins each PTLA volume. When the project first got underway (about 1995), optical character recognition (OCR) software did not cope well with text in columns. The columns were therefore cut apart and marginal text trimmed away. The resulting strips were scanned and OCRed in alphabetical order, and the resulting text file was edited as necessary. Global search-and-replace made it possible to associate the PTLA year with each entry.
Ten or more years were then copied into a single file. This text was selected and point-size made very small in order that no paragraph (i.e., entry) exceeded one line. The entire text was then re-alphabetted and edited to eliminate redundant information. Information on which year or years a particular publisher's catalog appeared was abbreviated. Decade files were later merged in the same way to produce the cumulative list.
When both initials and a full form of name appeared in a span of years, the fuller form has been preferred. Changing designations such as "Co.", "& Co.", "& Son", or "Inc." have generally been retained for firms that are represented for several years; they have not been noted consistently for firms represented in only two or three years when the form of entry differs (on the grounds that either "Co." or "& Co." -- or neither -- might in fact have been "correct"). Incidental changes, such as "Jones, Smith W., Co." in one year and "Jones (Smith W.) Co." in another, have not been retained as the index format varied from year to year (and was not always entirely consistent within year). Cross-references have been retained on the grounds that they seem at the time to have been necessary -- even though in many cases they now seem obvious.
Alphabetting of the draft lists is largely that dictated by the Microsoft Word paragraph-ordering rules, modified in some cases to put original and successor firms in chronological order. A final alphabetting will review firm names that begin "Mc", "Mac", "O'", "St.", etc.
Spans of years - e.g, "1873-1888" - are inclusive.
Sidney F. Huttner
Iowa City, Iowa
4/2008
Copyright in this page and all pages created by me at this site is retained by Sidney F. Huttner, 2000