Joseph Niver started a small literary/radical journal, Earth, in Wheaton, Illinois, in 1930. In 1931, production of the journal was moved to Salem, Oregon. The stock market crash had a deleterious effect on subscriptions, and it ceased publication in 1932 after thirteen issues. In 1977, Niver published Earth: A History, in which he tells about the inception and production of the journal, and which include facsimiles of the first three volumes.

Niver, along with his wife Betty, enjoyed a close friendship with Gertrude Traubel, and Niver and Gertrude Traubel edited The Artsman: The Art That Is Life together. Niver also wrote an introduction to a retrospective of the Conservator, which was apparently never published.

Horace Traubel was born December 19, 1858. Shortly after his family came to Camden in 1873, they became friends with Walt Whitman. In 1890 Traubel founded a monthly paper in Camden called The Conservator, which he published from that time until his death in 1919. He also published a small Arts and Crafts movement journal, The Artsman, from 1903 to 1907. He published some literary works -- Chants Communal in 1904, Optimos in 1910, and Collects in 1915. Today, however, he is probably best remembered for his painstaking record of his conversations with Whitman during that poet's last years. Titled With Walt Whitman in Camden, it was published in three volumes during Traubel's lifetime. After his death, volume 4 was published in 1953, edited by Sculley Bradley; volumes 5 and 6 were published, edited by Gertrude Traubel, in 1964 and 1982 respectively; and volume 7 was published, edited by Jeanne Chapman, in 1992.

Traubel's daughter, Gertrude, was a contralto singer well known in the Philadelphia region. In addition to editing some of her father's work after his death, she served as an unofficial editor at the Conservator. She edited, with Joseph Niver, The Artsman: The Art That Is Life.

In 1991, Niver donated his records to the University of Iowa Special Collections Department.