Kirkus, Virginia (1893–1980)

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Kirkus, Virginia (1893–1980)

American critic and author who founded Kirkus Bookshop Service. Born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, on December 7, 1893; died in Danbury, Connecticut, on September 10, 1980; daughter of the Reverend Frederick Maurice Kirkus and Isabella (Clark) Kirkus; attended Misses Hebbs School, Wilmington, Delaware; attended Hannah More Academy, Reisterstown, Maryland; graduated from Vassar College, 1916; attended Columbia University Teachers College; married Frank Glick (a personnel executive).

Born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, in 1893, Virginia Kirkus was educated in private schools and graduated from Vassar College in 1916. After completing additional teachers' training courses, she taught history and English at the Greenhill School in Delaware. In 1919, she left teaching to pursue an editorial career. She held a series of writing and editorial jobs in New York, including freelance work for Doubleday, for whom she wrote Everywoman's Guide to Health and Beauty (1922). From 1925 to 1932, Kirkus headed up the children's book department of Harper & Brothers, a job she later called "the most responsible position I ever had."

When the Depression hit, Kirkus, like so many others, found herself out of work. To keep her perspective and not jump at any job offered, Kirkus went ahead with plans for a trip abroad. On the return voyage, she hatched the idea for a liaison service between publishers and booksellers which she modestly launched as the Virginia Kirkus Bookshop Service in 1933. Providing booksellers with brief critical evaluations of new books in the form of a chatty bimonthly bulletin, Kirkus supplied prepublication information that had not been available before. When booksellers discovered that her predictions about new books were 85% accurate (particularly her identification of "sleepers," such as John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat and Rachel Field 's Time Out of Mind), they began signing up in droves. Publisher participation also grew from an initial 20 ("optimists and progressives all of them," she said) to include practically every major firm in the industry. Many libraries also made use of the service, which, in addition to critical evaluations of new books, provided subscribers with information on changing titles, prices, and publication dates, and assisted them with promotion ideas.

In addition to heading the service, which required reading over 700 books a year and frequent travel, Kirkus also found time to write many articles and to collaborate (with Frank Scully) on two children's books, Fun in Bed for Children and Junior Fun in Bed, both published in 1935. With her husband Frank Glick, a personnel executive, she also remodeled and landscaped an old farmhouse in Redding, Connecticut, which she chronicled in A House for the Week Ends (1940). First Book of Gardening was published in 1956. At the time of her retirement in 1962, Kirkus reviewers were previewing books for some 4,000 subscribers. In 1971, the enterprise was sold to The New York Review of Books.