Among publishers, Joseph Palmer Knapp was the master of the low profile. During his life he owned and directed five magazines, three newspaper supplements, one New York City daily newspaper, and a book-publishing house. These publications were printed at a Knapp-owned plant that at one time held some of the most sophisticated presses and produced half the newspaper rotogravure sections in the United States.

When he died, however, on 30 January 1951, at the age of eighty-six, Knapp received only a short, one-column obituary in the New York Times. And the publisher whose magazines had a combined total circulation of more than fifteen million was not mentioned in Who's Who in America and was given but a one-paragraph obituary in both Time and Newsweek, the latter listing him as a "leader in lithography." Knapp, however, was one of the country's major publishers, and while he did pioneer the multicolor printing...