The Stewart Brothers & Their Book

In the early decades of the twentieth century, a series of books was published that pushed back against the rising tide of theological liberalism. It was not a publishing company or seminary that conceived of and published these books, but a pair of laymen: the Stewart brothers.
Lyman and Milton Stewart grew up in an area of Pennsylvania that came to be called Oil City, so named because of the discovery of oil there. The Stewart brothers went into the oil business and eventually sold their oil company to Standard Oil. They then moved out to California and started another oil business. Lyman was probably the more entrepreneurial of the two brothers and had probably as many business ventures that failed as succeeded.

 But the major project that they undertook was a book series that came to be called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth. These books were originally published as a twelve-volume paperback series beginning in the early 1910s and ending around 1915. When they finally had all twelve volumes published, the Stewart brothers paid to have three million copies printed and distributed for free all over the country and around the world to English-speaking people. This was a massive undertaking, not only to print that many copies and distribute them, but also to produce the series in the first place.