Spring 1925
The Bookmark was founded by
J.M. Dent & Sons in spring 1925 as a means of promoting its new titles. Priced at threepence, it was published quarterly in London.
In 1906, the publishing firm of
Joseph Mallaby Dent established the
Temple Press in order to produce the
Everyman Library, a projected series of one thousand reprints of classic works, price one shilling. A major publishing venture of the twentieth century, it continues today under the aegis of
Random House. In October 1912, Dent launched
Everyman, a penny literary weekly designed 'to foster a taste for books among the proletariat'. Although the magazine folded in 1920, it was succeeded by
The Bookmark and re-launched as a twopenny weekly in January 1929. Renamed
Bookmark and Everyman, the firm's house journal continued to appear until 1938.
Dent became the main publisher of Conrad's works in Britain after 1913, including
Within the Tides,
The Shadow-Line,
The Rescue,
Notes on Life and Letters,
Suspense, and
Last Essays. In addition to bringing out second English editions of
Youth and
Lord Jim in 1917, and
Nostromo in 1918, he planned an inexpensive collected edition of Conrad's writings, which eventually appeared as Dent's Uniform Edition (1923-1928) and which was reissued as Dent's Collected Edition (1946-1955).
Conrad profited handsomely from Dent’s business acumen and wrote humorously to Charles Sarolea, editor of
Everyman in August 1912: 'The Chancellor of the Exchequer [David Lloyd George] has given the suffering humanity ninepence for fourpence [i.e. the National Insurance Act of 1911], but I see that Mr Dent means to beat that generous statesman hollow by offering a weekly "feast of reason and flow of soul" for a penny' (CL 5:94). Privately, he was less flattering about Dent’s ventures into popular publishing and disparaged
Everyman as a 'rotten rag' (CL 5:167).
Sources
Davies, Laurence, et al., ed.
The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983-2007. 9 vols.
The ABC of Collecting Everyman's Library. Wilson Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“J.M. Dentâ€.
The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad. Ed. Owen Knowles and Gene M. Moore. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 90-91.