Publishers Modernize.

During the nineteenth century, most book publishers in America believed theirs was an ivory-tower profession, bearing the cultural and social responsibility of providing Americans with works of literary distinction or political and philosophical distinction, whether such volumes returned a profit or not; but in the decade 1900 to 1909, shocked by the collapse of two of the nation's oldest and most formidable houses, Harper and Appleton, publishers grew progressively less genteel and more aggressively profit-oriented and businessminded. In the very first year of the decade, the venerable institutions of Harper's and Appleton did not disappear from the American publishing scene, but only because they were rescued from bankruptcy by Wall Street financiers. In the process, Wall Street found the publishers' idealism quaint and their mismanagement maddening; and in the following years a much more fiscally minded generation of managers moved into the industry to...