The New International Encyclopædia/Putnam, George Palmer

PUTNAM, George Palmer (1814-72). A grandnephew of Israel Putnam, and a New York publisher. He was born in Brunswick, Me., February 7, 1814. At fourteen he entered the bookstore of D. and J. Leavitt, New York. In 1840 he became partner in the house of Wiley & Putnam, of which he established a London branch in 1841. In 1848 he returned to New York and founded the publishing house which later became the firm of G. P. Putnam's Sons. Bookmaking interested him as an art from the beginning. In 1852, with the aid of George William Curtis, he established Putnam's Magazine (discontinued in 1857, revived 1860-70). In 1861 he organized the Loyal Publication Society, suspended his business for three years (1863-66) to become United States Collector of Internal Revenue, and then refounded his publishing house in conjunction with his sons, George Haven and John Bishop. He was a founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of which he was made honorary superintendent in 1872. He was also Chairman of the Committee on Art at the Vienna Universal Exposition. He died in New York City December 20, 1872. Putnam was the author, among other works, of: Chronology, or an Introduction and Index to Universal History, Biography, and Useful Knowledge (1833); American Book Circular with Notes and Statistics (1843); American Facts, Notes and Statistics Relative to the Government of the United States (1845); The World's Progress — a Dictionary of Dates (1850), and a supplement to this work (1861). His son, George Haven (1844—), was born in London and was educated in New York City, at the Sorbonne, and in Göttingen. He served in the Union Army during the Civil War, and rose to the rank of brevet major. Like his father, he took an ardent interest in copyright law, becoming secretary of the American Publishers' Copyright League in 1887. His publications include: Authors and Publishers (1882, with J. Bishop Putnam); Question of Copyright (1891); The Artificial Mother (1894); and Books and Their Makers in the Middle Ages (1896). To Mason and Lalor's Political Encjiclopcedia he contributed a valuable paper on “Literary Property.”