Herschel V. Jones

Herschel V. Jones (August 30, 1861 – May 24, 1928) was a publisher of the Minneapolis Journal (now the Star Tribune) for twenty years as well as a noted book collector. He is best known for his collection of Americana.

Jones' personal philosophy was that "credit, based on character and integrity" was more important than available cash. With it, he went from being a farm-boy who dropped out of school to become a publisher and editor, patron of literature and the arts, and collector of Americana.

Jones' career in journalism started early. At fifteen, he began to work on the staff of the Jefferson Courier (in Jefferson, Schoharie County, N.Y.) where he was born and raised. At eighteen he bought the paper for $700. In 1885, when he was 24, he sold the Jefferson Courier at a profit of $700 and went to Minneapolis as a reporter on the Minneapolis Journal.

In 1890 he started a market and crop report service for the Journal. Two notable predictions, one of heavy crops in 1900 and one of wheat-rust losses in 1904, gave him a national reputation. In 1901 he founded the Commercial West, a financial and grain news weekly. In 1908 he bought the Minneapolis Journal for $1,200,000 (with only $25,000 in assets of his own.) He remained connected to the Minneapolis Journal for the rest of his life.

He was one of the directors of the Associated Press for a number of years.

Jones is remembered more as a book-collector than as a journalist. Over his lifetime he amassed four significant book collections. His first collection of about 600 first editions of modern authors was started with the purchase of a first edition of Robert Browning's Inn Album. It has been described as one of the early first-edition collections, and was eventually sold.

His second collection of about 2,000 volumes of early English poetry and drama was notable in that it sold at auction in New York in 1918-19 for about $400,000. (The New York Times claimed this number was $391,854.)

His third collection was of Elizabethan items. It was sold in 1923 for $137,865.

But it was his last collection of early Americana that was the most remarkable. The collection of 1,700 volumes, primarily first editions, covered 400 years of American history dating back to Columbus. Before his death, Jones supervised the publication of a two-volume catalog of about 300 of the most valuable of these books, which was titled Adventures in Americana, 1492-1897: The Romance of Voyage and Discovery.

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