A.C. McClurg & Company

A.C. McClurg & Co. made the vast majority of its money as wholesale distributors, using their Chicago location to ship books, stationery, and other retail products to the West. Nevertheless, the company sought to establish its reputation alongside the prestigious literary publishers of Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston.

 General Alexander Caldwell McClurg (1832-1901), a veteran of the Civil War, thought of himself as a publisher of “good books.” He wrote reviews of major novels of the era and praised the formation of the Grolier Club in New York. He hired George Millard to manage a Rare Books section in the company’s bookstore, which Eugene Field named the “Saints and Sinners Corner.” In 1880, editor Francis F. Browne founded house magazine The Dial, which he imagined as a successor to the transcendentalist publication of the same name. The magazine would become an important organ of literary modernism in the 1920s, although by that point, it was no longer affiliated with Browne or McClurg.

Somewhat surprisingly, during the 1890s and into the early years of the 20th century the company, the company aimed to establish its reputation by publishing work by multi-ethnic authors, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Emma Wolf, and Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far. Indeed, McClurg & Co. actively solicited The Souls of Black Folk. Many of the book's chapters were drawn from articles published in the Atlantic Monthly, and Du Bois was initially reluctant to publish them as a collection.

By the second decade of the 20th century, the A.C. McClurg & Co. catalog would turn toward popular genre fiction. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan series was the company's best seller, and they also published western writers Zane Grey and Clarence Mulford. From 1923 onward, the company focused exclusively on wholesale distribution of goods, rather than book publication. They remained in business until 1962.