About

Reverend John William Burke was trained as a printer in Athens, Georgia, and published the Cassville Standard from 1849 to 1855 before joining the Methodist Church. In 1858, Burke was transferred to Macon, Georgia to manage the Methodist Book Repository. While maintaining his activity in the church and acting as treasure for the Soldiers’ Tract Association, Burke established his own publishing house, the J. W. Burke & Company, in 1864. J. W. Burke & Company grew into a major Georgia publishing house during its operation. Burke printed a variety of texts and among them was a weekly paper geared towards children called the Children’s Guide. This was a short-lived war-time newspaper meant to provide children with suitable reading material. Wanting to re-establish a children’s weekly after the war, Burke published the first issue of Burke’s Weekly for Boys and Girls in June 1867.The inaugural issue contained the first chapter of Marooner’s Island, the sequel to Reverend Francis Robert Goulding’s popular Young Marooners. The paper was largely literary in content and featured stories, poems, anecdotes, and riddles accompanied by illustrations. Each week, subscribers received a quarto-sized issue of eight pages that continued stories from the previous week. Burke published the newspaper in such a way that at the end of the year a four hundred page volume could be purchased with a title page and index. In the first week of January 1871, Burke announced that Burke’s Weekly was going to become a forty-eight page monthly magazine. A year later, citing a lack of patronage, the magazine ceased publication.