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SIGNATURES
Identified individuals are represented by a biographical sketch, a list of connections to other signatures, and, in most cases, an artifact from the Ransom Centers collections. Help us identify more signatures by submitting your suggested identification.
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THE DOOR
Location on door: front, panel 3
GEORGE WILLIAM AMIS
Publisher's salesman George Amis worked for the Harcourt, Brace publishing company for several decades. In 1921, he worked as a "traveller," a salesman who visits bookshops to promote new publications and backlist items to shop owners and managers. A profile of Harcourt's spring list that year in Publishers Weekly notes, "As their textbook list begins to be a significant part of their work, they plan to devote a good deal of attention to developing that side of the business." In the decades to come, Harcourt was to become a major force in textbook publishing.
The dust jacket of Heywood Broun's Seeing Things at Night (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921)
If Amis visited Frank Shay's bookshop on a sales call in the months just after the shop opened, it is likely that he would have promoted this collection of Broun's essays to Frank Shay. Other shop-related books on the Harcourt list that year included Helen Louise Cohen's One-Act Plays by Modern Authors, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, and Ludwig Lewisohn's translation of Jakob Wassermann's World's Illusion.