In the fall of 1912, a Chicago-based wholesale trading house best known for shipping stationery, blank books, and drugstore sundries across the Midwest took a gamble that New York’s literary establishment had already passed on. A serialized adventure story about an English lord raised by apes in the African jungle had made the rounds of the era’s major book publishers and, by most accounts, had been turned down by several before A.C. McClurg & Co. agreed to put it between hard covers. This example offers a useful window into both Chicago publishing history and why a city known for moving freight and stock was, in some respects, better positioned to publish popular fiction than the East Coast houses that had first refusal on it.
Chicago’s Rise as a Publishing and Distribution Center
By the 1880s, Chicago had become, by many accounts, the largest publishing center west of New York City. Literary reputation had little to do with it. The city’s rail lines and warehouses let it move printed material efficiently to retailers across the West and Midwest, a region the East Coast houses served only at a logistical remove.
This gave the Chicago book trade a different character from the publishing establishments of New York and Boston, which built their reputations around literary fiction, poetry, and cultivating prestige authors. Chicago’s publishers grew out of bookselling and distribution operations that regarded books as one category of merchandise alongside stationery, office supplies, and general retail goods. That commercial orientation matters when considering why a manuscript established publishers had declined found a home in Chicago rather than Manhattan.
A.C. McClurg & Co.’s Place in the Chicago Book Trade
By the early twentieth century, A.C. McClurg & Co. had operated simultaneously as publisher, wholesaler, and retailer, with its wholesale distribution business providing the bulk of its revenue. This is not a company profile. Readers looking for a fuller account of the firm’s founding, its losses in Chicago’s nineteenth-century fires, and its eventual wind-down can find that covered elsewhere.
McClurg was not a distribution operation without literary credibility. The firm had published the magazine The Dial since 1880 and kept a rare-books section in its Wabash Avenue store that drew Chicago writers and editors. In 1903 it published W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. That mix of genuine publishing experience and large-scale wholesale reach put McClurg in a position to take on a commercial risk that more East Coast-oriented literary houses were reluctant to touch.
Edgar Rice Burroughs and a Manuscript Publishers Didn’t Want
Edgar Rice Burroughs was a failed businessman who became a pulp writer when he wrote the story that would become Tarzan of the Apes. It ran in its entirety in the pulp magazine The All-Story in October 1912, appearing on newsstands slightly earlier, in early September, according to bibliographic research on Burroughs’s publication history.
Multiple sources describe the manuscript as having been rejected by several established book publishers before it reached McClurg. The Los Angeles Public Library’s account of Burroughs’s career states plainly that the story was rejected by “virtually every major book publisher of the era.” The specific list of publishers who passed on it, and their individual reasons, is not consistently documented across sources, so it should be treated with care rather than as settled fact. What can be said, as editorial inference rather than documented record, is that a pulp jungle venture serialized in a magazine with a mass popular audience fell outside what prestige East Coast houses were built to publish, and that likely explains at least part of the early resistance.
From Serial to Hardcover and the Mechanics of the Deal
A.C. McClurg & Co. published Tarzan of the Apes in hardcover on June 17, 1914. At least one copy reached Burroughs slightly earlier. He autographed a copy for his wife on June 3, according to bibliographic research by Burroughs scholar Robert B. Zeuschner. The book sold for two dollars.
What made McClurg a workable publisher in this case had less to do with editorial daring than with commercial infrastructure. A firm that already moved merchandise wholesale to retailers across the West and Midwest did not need to build a distribution apparatus from scratch. Getting a popular adventure novel onto shelves in dry-goods stores, drugstores, and small-town booksellers outside the major coastal markets was a logistics problem, and it is the kind of problem McClurg’s wholesale business solved for other products every day. Exact print-run and sales figures for the first edition are not reliably documented in the sources reviewed here, so they are best left unspecified rather than estimated. What is documented is that the book became a bestseller, and that collectible first editions still change hands for thousands of dollars, a rough indicator of the scale the original print run reached.
What Tarzan’s Success Reveals About Early Twentieth-Century Publishing
The Tarzan deal was not a one-time thing. McClurg went on to publish more installments in the series, including The Return of Tarzan in 1915 and The Beasts of Tarzan in 1916, followed by The Son of Tarzan and further titles through the 1920s. The firm also published other Burroughs work and popular western fiction by writers including Zane Grey and Clarence Mulford. That pattern suggests a deliberate commercial strategy rather than a single lucky bet. Having found a genre and an author that moved volume through its existing distribution channels, the firm kept working the same vein.
The episode also shows a pipeline that was becoming increasingly established in the American publishing house trade during this period. Munsey’s All-Story, under editor Thomas Newell Metcalf, had effectively de-risked the material for a book publisher before McClurg ever acquired it. Readers had already voted with their attention. That turn toward popular fiction is one chapter in A.C. McClurg’s history, running from an 1844 Chicago stationery shop to the present day. The sequence of serializing first and publishing in book form second would go on to shape how a great deal of popular genre fiction reached print for decades afterward.
A Chicago Case Study in American Publishing
None of this required A.C. McClurg to be a literary tastemaker. It required the firm to have wholesale distribution relationships across a region the eastern houses served less directly, publishing infrastructure sufficient to produce a finished book, and a willingness to bet on serialized popular fiction that had already found readers rather than fiction that needed to build literary credibility from scratch. Those were, mostly, the defining traits of Chicago’s historic booksellers and wholesale-publishers, firms shaped by distribution economics as much as by editorial judgment.
Seen this way, the Tarzan publication is not a story about one lucky manuscript finding a sympathetic editor. It is a small, well-documented case study in how a regional book trade built around wholesaling and reach, rather than literary prestige, could make publishing decisions that establishment houses were structurally reluctant to make, and then move the book to readers across a part of the country the eastern publishers understood less well. It is also part of why the McClurg name has since been taken up again rather than left in the archive. That combination of commercial infrastructure and appetite for popular fiction is what a closer look at Chicago publishing history actually shows. The trade was built not on gatekeeping but on getting books, wanted or unwanted by the establishment, into people’s hands.
