Before the New York Times best-seller list, there was The Bookman. Founded in 1895, the illustrated monthly literary journal was the only place to find out what were supposed to be the country’s top-selling books and remained so until 1912, when Publishers Weekly began producing its own best-seller lists. The Bookman’s first editor, Harry Thurston Peck, a Latin professor at Columbia, took his inspiration for the lists from a monthly British magazine combining industry news and book reviews with poetry, essays, and serialized books that was also called The Bookman, founded in 1891. Subtitled A Monthly Journal for Bookreaders, Bookbuyers, and Booksellers, it served as a kind of model for its American namesake. Published by the major New York publishing house Dodd, Mead, and Company, The Bookman offered its readers bookish news, profiles of prominent authors and their work, both long and short reviews of new books, and, of course, lists of best-selling books. These lists, with all their vagaries and inaccuracies, began to shape discussions about popular literature almost immediately. Books that appeared on these lists, whether or not they were truly the top-selling books of their day, became best sellers because the lists said they were.
Once invented, the best seller could be discussed in literary journals, trade publications, social circles, and book clubs, solidifying a popular conception of what it meant to be a best seller and what it meant to read one. In 1914 the Washington Herald published a short feature, “What Women Should Read,” in which a father advises his son against marrying women who read best sellers, saying, “There have been more domestic disturbances over the best-seller habit than any other one thing.” He claims that women taken up with reading best sellers would neglect their housework—the same argument critics made about reading novels in general one hundred years before. Women had long been considered especially susceptible to the engrossing power of novels, which would both distract them and inflame their passions, potentially leading to immorality. In 1799, in her book on women’s education, religious writer Hannah More wrote that novels were “daily becoming vehicles of wider mischief,” dressing up vice as virtue and teaching “that no duty exists which is not prompted by feeling.” Discussions about best sellers as a coherent subset of books also helped establish the authority of the lists as the final word on what people were reading, even as critics questioned the methodologies and advertisers appropriated the term best seller to promote titles, however dubious the claim to the label.