Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly, familiarly known in the book world as PW and “the bible of the book business,” is a weekly news magazine focused on the international book publishing business. It is targeted at publishers, booksellers, librarians, literary agents, authors and the media. It offers feature articles and news on all aspects of the book business, bestsellers lists in a number of categories, and industry statistics, but its best known service is pre-publication book reviews, publishing some 8,000 per year.

The magazine was born in 1872 as The Publishers’ Weekly (the article and the apostrophe were later dropped), a collective catalog where publishers pooled their resources to create one common listing of new books, issued each week. The aim was to keep booksellers and librarians informed of forthcoming titles, but an array of features and articles were added as years went by. The original creator of the magazine, and its first editor, was the German-born Frederick Leypoldt, a passionate bibliographer—so passionate and hard-working that he died prematurely, at the age of 49, in 1884. An early colleague in the enterprise was Richard Rogers Bowker, a literary journalist and also a keen bibliographer, who went on to create the R.R. Bowker Company. Bowker ultimately became the owner of PW, and later began to publish the massive annual Books in Print volumes and assign the International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) given to every published book. Another key player in PW’s history, who joined the magazine in 1918 and was active in it for over 40 years, was Frederic G. Melcher, a polymath who served as secretary of the American Booksellers Association, helped create the National Association of Publishers, and launched such notable book awards as the Newbery and Caldecott Medals for children’s books and the Carey-Thomas Awards for distinguished publishing. He also created Children’s Book Week and was responsible for the early extensive coverage of children’s books that has remained a PW tradition.