The editor William Earnest Henley set high literary standards; his printer Walter Blaikie produced beautifully typeset issues; and his contributors enjoyed the freedom of publishing high-quality work without editorial amputation or undue intervention. 

“Instead, it is the editorial acumen of Henley that strikes readers almost a century later. He had the courage to sponsor the still young and obscure W.B. Yeats, eighteen of whose poems and several of whose tales were first printed in the Observer. Henley had the charisma to attract and to retain Rudyard Kipling.... Furthermore, other significant poets — A.C. Swinburne, Robert Louis Stevenson” (Hughes, "What the Wellesley Index Left Out").