Joseph Palmer Knapp was an American publisher, businessman and philanthropist. He took part in a variety of business ventures, primarily associated with printing and publishing.
Background
Joseph Palmer Knapp was born on May 14, 1864 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States, the son of Joseph Fairchild and Phoebe Palmer Knapp. His father, a partner in the successful lithographic firm of Major and Knapp, was also president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company from 1871 to 1891. Young Knapp displayed his father's autocratic temper and managerial skill, along with a strain of evangelical piety that was particularly notable in his mother, a composer of Methodist hymns.
Education
Knapp attended the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, then entered Columbia University in the fall of 1880. In 1881 he dropped out of college.
Career
In 1881 Knapp went to work for his father's printing company, at an apprentice's salary of $5 a week. The elder Knapp, disgusted by his son's poor scholastic record, showed him no favors, but Knapp soon developed business acumen and drive. He began to solicit printing contracts during his lunch hours and after work, with impressive results. One of his earliest and most important customers was James B. Duke of North Carolina, who was then building up the American Tobacco Company. As the volume of his sales increased, Knapp accepted stock in his father's company (then styled Knapp and Company) in lieu of commissions. By 1891 he was able to purchase his father's interest in the firm and take control of the business. Thereafter Knapp branched into publishing.
From 1891 to 1896 he joined with Duke in publishing a daily newspaper, the New York Recorder, and he enlarged his printing facilities by absorbing a dozen competitors to create the American Lithographic Company (1895). He was instrumental in developing a multicolor press, which picked up a sheet of paper and carried it over six cylinders, each imparting a separate color impression. This invention encouraged him to establish in 1903 the Associated Sunday Magazine, one of the early supplements for Sunday newspapers and the first to be syndicated. It had achieved a circulation of 1, 530, 000 copies when the rising cost of paper during World War I caused the participating newspapers to drop it.
Another Knapp publication, a popular three-cent magazine titled Every Week, failed in 1917 for similar reasons after three profitable years. Knapp's interest in improved rotogravure printing continued throughout his life. Although he sold the American Lithographic Company in 1929, he retained a subsidiary, Alco Gravure (established in 1910), which eventually printed half the newspaper rotogravure sections in the United States. He also reentered the Sunday supplement field in 1935 with This Week, a nationally syndicated magazine which attained a circulation of more than six million copies by the time of his death. Knapp managed these enterprises through a holding company, Publication Corporation, of which he was a principal stockholder and chairman of the board. Through a complex system of interlocking directorates, Publication Corporation also controlled the Crowell-Collier Publishing Company, the final link in Knapp's publishing empire. The Crowell-Collier concern was formally organized in 1934, but its constituent firms were acquired by Knapp much earlier.
In 1906 he and two associates, Samuel Untermyer and Thomas W. Lamont, purchased the Crowell Publishing Company, a corporation that produced two leading magazines, Farm and Fireside and Woman's Home Companion. Five years later, under Knapp's direction, Crowell bought a "magazine for men, " American Magazine, and in 1919 acquired the business of P. F. Collier and Son, which included Collier's Weekly and a large subscription book business. The Collier firm was managed separately until 1934, when it was merged with Crowell. From 1920 to 1930 Crowell also published a small quality magazine, Mentor, the only one of its publications not designed for mass circulation. Although Knapp insisted that he wanted his magazines to aid in the development of a "better America, " he rarely encouraged crusading journalism of any sort.
His periodicals tended to be success-oriented and to celebrate the opportunities available to individuals within a competitive capitalist society. Such an emphasis was in keeping with his own creed of enlightened conservatism and noblesse oblige, in which he much resembled Andrew Carnegie. Like Carnegie, Knapp believed in the essential benevolence of the free enterprise system, but acknowledged a personal obligation to use his surplus wealth in support of worthy causes that promised to advance the well-being of society. He was instrumental in making the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company a mutual company in 1914 by selling his commanding block of stock to the policyholders at a fraction of its market value.
Achievements
Connections
Knapp was married three times. His first wife was Sylvia Kepner, whom he married in 1886; they had two children before their divorce in May 1903. A second wife, Elizabeth Laing McIlwaine, died. In 1923 he married Margaret E. Rutledge, who survived him.