[1] Pulp historian Ed Hulse has stated that between the 1910s and the 1950s Blue Book "achieved and sustained a level of excellence reached by few other magazines".

Publications took over the reins in October 1960, Hanro (Sterling) was the publisher from August 1964 until March 1966 and then the QMG Magazine Corporation, beginning April 1967.

[4] Blue Book also published the "Free Lances in Diplomacy" (1910) series by Clarence H. New (1862–1933) of early spy stories.

[3] In the 1920s, Blue Book's roster of authors included two of the world's most famous writers of popular fiction: Edgar Rice Burroughs and Agatha Christie.

[4] Adventure fiction was a staple of Blue Book; in addition to Burroughs, P. C. Wren, H. Bedford-Jones, Achmed Abdullah, George F. Worts, Lemuel de Bra (who specialized in "Chinatown" thrillers) and William L. Chester (with his Burroughs-influenced "Hawk of the Wilderness", about a white boy adopted by Native Americans) all published in the magazine.

[3] Sea stories were also popular in Blue Book, and George Fielding Eliot, Captain A. E. Dingle and Albert Richard Wetjen were some of the publication's authors known for this subgenre.

[3] Writers during the 1940s included Nelson S. Bond, Max Brand, Gelett Burgess, Eustace Cockrell, Irvin S. Cobb, Robert A. Heinlein, MacKinlay Kantor, Willy Ley, Theodore Pratt, Ivan Sanderson, Luke Short (pseudonym of Frederick D. Glidden, 1908–1975), Booth Tarkington, Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, Philip Wylie and Dornford Yates.

Blue Book managed to attract fiction from a number of authors who did not normally publish in pulp magazines, including Georges Simenon, Shelby Foote and William Lindsay Gresham.