The Boundaries of American Religious Publishing in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

The Boundaries of American Religious Publishing in the Early Twentieth Century Joan Shelley Rubin (bio) In 1923, Helen D. Bragdon, a recent graduate of Mt. Holyoke who was serving as the general secretary of the college’s YWCA chapter, proudly informed her classmates that she and her camp director, Laura I. Mattoon, had been working on a book. At the behest of their publisher, the Century Company, the two young women had traveled to Manhattan to read proof. Bragdon’s decision to mention the trip resonates with her excitement at gaining access, albeit briefly, to the glamorous world of New York publishing—the world that was, at that moment, turning out the novels of Sinclair Lewis and Fannie Hurst. Yet the volume of Mattoon and Bragdon’s that issued from that milieu was, as Bragdon self-deprecatingly remarked, “nothing big and author-like,” but, rather, a collection of interdenominational Protestant worship services for summer camps and similar gatherings. 1 The provenance and purpose of that collection, entitled Services for the Open, alert the historian of the book to two points. The first is in the nature of a reminder: that American Protestant publishing in the early twentieth century consisted of more than the periodical output of denominational houses. The second is that the uses of texts—the settings in which readers appropriated them—conferred upon them religious meanings they did not possess in every context. The Protestant universe was a wide one, encompassing Mennonites and Pentecostals as well as liberal or mainline Methodists and Baptists—a diversity that makes generalizations hazardous. Yet, at least with respect to the nonfundamentalist denominations on which this essay concentrates, both points together argue that “religious publishing” may be a more capacious term than scholars have consistently recognized. [End Page 207] The first proposition is virtually self-evident if one counts as “religious” certain best-sellers of the 1920s: Henrik Van Loon’s The Story of the Bible (Boni & Liveright, 1923); Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ, translated by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (Harcourt, Brace, 1923); Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows (Bobbs-Merrill, 1925). Yet emphasizing such popular texts (as cultural historians have done in the case of Barton especially) still leaves largely invisible the range of the general book trade’s religious titles. Nor do existing studies supply much help in recovering that range. For the most part, works analyzing “Christian communication” have slighted book publication altogether, focusing instead on magazines and newspapers. The essays in Martin E. Marty et al., The Religious Press in America (1963), for example, use the term “press” to denote a “field” separate from the one encompassing both books and scholarly journals of theology. Similarly, Paul A. Soukup’s bibliographical survey of Christian mass media contains only a handful of entries that refer to book production, whereas many of the authors he cites equate print with journalism. Furthermore, the few accounts that do document trade publishers’ activities have their own limitations. The most detailed overview, John Tebbel’s encyclopedic A History of Book Publishing in the United States (1975, 1978), is by its nature superficial. Judith S. Duke, in Religious Publishing and Communications, usefully highlights two commercial book publishers with large religion departments, Doubleday and Harper & Row, but writes merely as an observer of those firms as they functioned in 1981. The brief but insightful survey Hendrik Edelman assembled for Christian Book Publishing and Distribution in the United States and Canada (1987) locates religious publishing within the context of the book industry as a whole. Yet the relatively obscure volume in which Edelman’s essay appears (a photo-offset paperback produced by a consortium of Christian groups) mirrors the marginal status historians have accorded his subject matter. Finally, the otherwise invaluable Bowker compilation Religious Books, 1876–1982, alphabetically organized by subject, does not readily yield an inventory of what individual publishing concerns brought out in a given year. 2 In the pages of such older reference tools as the United States Catalogue or the Cumulative Book Index, however—compendia that make it somewhat easier to track annual production in subject categories for a manageable sample of years—the role of nondenominational houses as religious publishers becomes clearer. In...