(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
Harry Scherman was an American publisher and entrepreneur, most notable as the co-founder of the Book of the Month Club.
Background
Harry was born on February 1, 1887 in Montreal, Canada, the son of Jacob Scherman, a laborer, and Katharine Harris. The family moved to Philadelphia in 1889, and four years later Scherman's father abandoned the family to return to his native England. Thereafter, Scherman's mother was forced to find employment.
Education
Scherman graduated from Central High School in Philadelphia and then enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where he attended classes at the Wharton School of Finance.
Career
After two years Harry Scherman left college to support his family and worked in the New York area at newspaper jobs and at various advertising agencies, including J. Walter Thompson.
Scherman specialized in writing advertising copy for book publishers. While working with Max Sackheim, he met the brothers Albert and Charles Boni, and in 1916 the four formed a partnership that began publishing inexpensive leather-bound literary classics. Priced at ten cents, 48 million of their books sold over an eight-year span until the market was glutted. The partnership broke up in 1924.
Later for two years Scherman operated a book-of-the-week club that offered subscribers low-cost classics at the rate of fifty-two books annually. Convinced that a vast market for inexpensive books existed outside the metropolitan areas, Scherman decided to launch a subscription bookselling service based on the premise that most Americans lacked access to well-stocked book stores, "but everybody has a mailbox. "
With two partners and $40, 000 in capital, Scherman began the Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC) in 1926 as a marketing concept involving a prestigious board of editors to select the books, discounts on popular titles, and a total reliance on the United States Post Office's parcel delivery system. Scherman wrote the club's advertisements and placed them in major magazines with a national circulation, so that 4, 750 subscribers were in the fold initially.
By 1931, Scherman was BOMC president, signing checks that helped hard-pressed publishers meet their payrolls, as well as writing copy for advertisements and preparing the monthly newsletter. Scherman's advertising stressed the BOMC selection board, made up of several post-World War I literati - including Henry Seidel Canby, Heywood Broun, and William Allen White - and thus helped focus attention on their recommendations of such writers as Sinclair Lewis and Thornton Wilder.
He became chairman of the board in 1950 and watched BOMC membership rolls reach the million mark in that decade. Meanwhile, although the company became publicly owned in 1947, Scherman and his family retained the majority interest.
An abiding personal interest in economics led in 1938 to the publication of his first book, The Promises Men Live By: A New Approach to Economics, which for a brief time sold briskly.
Scherman became an active friend of refugees from Nazi Germany, helping them with cash gifts and assistance in finding jobs in the publishing industry.
Until ten days before his death he insisted on a regular workday at his office and took pride in his speaking acquaintance with most of the 1, 000 BOMC employees. He died in New York.
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
Personality
Almost addicted to his work, Scherman went to his office early and stayed late. Basically a shy person, Scherman avoided luncheons and dinners where writers congregated and preferred quiet private clubs or his own family circle.
Scherman was notoriously absentminded; to compensate for this, he wrote postcards and mailed them to his home to act as reminders.
Interests
Scherman's outside interest was music, which he supported generously.
Connections
Scherman married Bernardine Kielty on June 3, 1914. Kielty was also a writer of non-fiction, juvenile fiction and a book columnist for The Ladies Home Journal. The couple had two children, Katharine Scherman Rosin (1915-2009), a writer of non-fiction, and Thomas Scherman (1917-1979), a recorded conductor of classical music, who also founded the Little Orchestra Society of New York City.