AN FOUNDATION AND THE BOOKMAN

"Thank you very much for the May Bookman," writes Hugh Walpole (June,
1922). "I have been reading The Bookman during the last year and I
congratulate Mr. Farrar most strongly upon it. The paper has now a
personality unlike any other that I know and it is the least dull of all
literary papers! I like especially the more serious articles, the series
of sketches of literary personalities seeming especially excellent to me."
Mr. Walpole evidently had in mind the feature of The Bookman called "The
Literary Spotlight."

"The Bookman is alive. If there is a better quality in the long run for a
general literary magazine to try for, I do not know what it is," writes
Carl Van Doren, literary editor of The Nation.

"Mr. Farrar has turned The Bookman into a monthly brimming with his own
creative enthusiasm," says Louis Untermeyer. "It has technically as well
as figuratively no rival."

And Irvin S. Cobb declares: "By my way of thinking, it is the most
informative, the most entertaining, and incidentally the brightest and
most amusing publication devoted to literature and its products that I
have ever seen."

=ii=

The idea of The Bookman Foundation first occurred in a discussion of the
future of the magazine and the ampler purposes it was desired to have The
Bookman serve. The idea had been advanced that more than the future of the
magazine should be considered; those to whom the welfare of the magazine
was a most important consideration distinctly felt that welfare to depend
upon a healthy and thriving condition of American literature and of
American interest in American literature. The broadest possible view, as
is so often the case, seemed the only ultimately profitable view. In what
way could The Bookman serve the interests of American literature in which
it was not already serving them? How could public interest in American
literature best be stimulated?

The idea gradually took shape as a form of foundation, naturally to be
called The Bookman Foundation, with a double purpose. Fundamentally The
Bookman Foundation is being established to stimulate the study of American
literature and its development; more immediately, and as the direct means
to that end, the purpose of the Foundation will be to afford a vehicle for
the best constructive criticism, spoken and written, on the beginnings and
development of our literature. In association with the faculty of English
at one of the larger and