The Weird, Vain History of Who’s Who Books

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From Atlas Obscura:

On an average day floating through the press release service PR Newswire, it’s inevitable that you run into a list of people who are designated as new members of a who’s who list.

The list always varies but the intent is usually the same: To give a person notice for their life and career, no matter how seemingly mediocre. And while today they might just be a function of lazy p.r., there was a time, not too long ago, when who’s who lists were a more curated experience. In the United Kingdom, that amounted to a 250-page reference book that debuted in 1849 and is still published today, aspiring to be a compendium “of living noteworthy and influential individuals, from all walks of life, worldwide.” In the U.S., the first who’s who book was a little less expansive, the business-savvy project of an eccentric self-made publisher named Albert Nelson Marquis, who, in 1899, published a reference book for people who did notable enough things to get in a reference book for people who did notable things (though his choices tended reflect a conservative point of view.)

That book’s list of notables, already topping 8,000 in the first edition, included every member of Congress along with nearly every other politician during the era. But, as the Chicago Tribune reported in 1986, Marquis was noted for his odd standards of who actually got in. Traditional celebrities from film or sport were often looked over, for one, in favor of educators, clergymen, or other notables that reflected Marquis’s own personal interests. He also tended to make moral judgments, excluding Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, because of his turbulent personal life.

. . . .

The company started in Cincinnati, but eventually moved to Chicago, where Marquis realized his dream: a first edition of Who’s Who in America, that made clear its intent in a prologue.

“Without claiming infallibility or inerrancy, it is believed that this publication will be a welcome addition to the list of handy helps that make up the library of indispensable books,” the prologue states. “Certainly nothing has been omitted that painstaking care, persistent effort, or expenditure of money could supply toward making the volume fully fill the purposes of its compilation.“

Link to the rest at Atlas Obscura

1 thought on “The Weird, Vain History of Who’s Who Books”

  1. Is it just me or is it ironic that these compendia of the ‘important’ are memorialized in the Atlas Obscura?

    Al who’s never made a who’s Who and can’t even find much when he Ego-Surfs the web

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