Paul Elder & Company

On 27 October, I added a new title to the Paul Elder checklist, the first addition in eight years. Title #423 is Coulee, A Poem of Vision, by David Brown-Lewers. The only known copy is held by the Library of Congress, which I stumbled across on the LC website while looking for something else.

This is a very slim booklet: the poem is just six pages long, with a two-page introduction by the poet. Unusually for Paul Elder, there is no colophon, which reinforces my belief that this is a vanity publication. Presumably, not many copies were printed, given that it took so long to discover this title.

The poem is an ode to the Perrine Coulee waterfall on the Snake River in Twin Falls, Idaho. The waterfall drops 200 feet and runs year round. In the winter, the trail to the falls is often covered in ice, and many large icicles form on the rock face. Brown-Lewers chose one such winter view for the tipped-in frontispiece.

Wikipedia reports that a coulee (from the French couler, to flow) describes “any of various different landforms, all of which are kinds of valleys or drainage zones. … In southern Louisiana, the word coulée (also spelled coolie) originally meant a gully or ravine usually dry or intermittent but becoming sizable during rainy weather. … In the northwestern United States, coulee is defined as a large, steep-walled, trench-like trough, which also include spillways and flood channels incised into the basalt plateau.”

The copyright page lists “David Brown-Lewers, San Francisco,” but I can find no record of a person with that name in San Francisco. So far, I can find only one record of a David Brown Lewers anywhere: as the groom on a marriage certificate with bride Stella Nash Driver, in Norristown, Pennsylvania in 1905. Stella next turns up in Moscow, Idaho in 1908, marrying Robert Chrissinger; on that marriage certificate, Stella is listed as a widow. If David Brown Lewers wrote a poem about Twin Falls, Idaho, it’s reasonable that his widow might end up in Moscow, Idaho—although the two cities are 425 miles apart, a long way even today. However, if this is the correct David Brown Lewers, then he was no longer alive in 1915 when Elder published his poem. This is a mystery still to be solved.

The most complex of Paul Elder’s ephemeral output were his many calendars. The Impressions Calendars was Elder’s longest-running and most successful calendar series. It debuted in 1902 and lasted at least through 1918. Printed in multiple colors on heavy card stock in order to hold up to constant handling, they were threaded with a sturdy cord for hanging on a wall.

The design was a familiar one: a tall portrait format, with artwork above and the calendar below. Originally there were twelve leaves, one per month, with the January leaf on top. By 1911, the format had changed to 54 leaves, one per week plus a title page on top and a colophon page at the bottom. The page-per-week calendars were sold in a matching box, which rarely survives. In 1918, the format changed again to two weeks per page, no doubt due to the skyrocketing price of paper, which was in turn one of the many side effects of World War I.

The New York Times was complimentary about the 1911 calendar:

The Impressions Calendar, (San Francisco: Paul Elder & Co., 50 cents, postage 10 cents) deserves the palm among American calendars for artistic beauty and distinctive quality. It has a page for each week of the year, with an impressionistic design, different for every page, as a background or margin for the quotation. These designs are in soft, pleasing colors and present the greatest variety of ideas and themes, from bits of conventionalized flower decorations to glimpses of landscapes. They are by Harold Sichel, Spencer Wright, and Charles Frank Ingerson. The quotations, which, with the illustrations, fill three-quarters of each page, are in prose and verse from famous authors, and have been selected with an eye both for literary grace and heartening message.¹New York Times, 3 December 1911, p804

The move from 12 to 54 pages, of course, meant 42 additional pages of artwork. Artwork for the Impression Calendars went hand-in-hand with artwork for the Impression Leaflet series. Most of the images appeared in both, though it’s not clear whether a given image appeared first as an Impression Leaflet and was subsequently used in an Impressions Calendar, or vice versa. Artwork may well have flowed in both directions.

As the calendar series matured, the subtlety and quality of the artwork also matured. Early calendar art often featured typeset text, enclosed in a simple frame, with an illuminated capital as the chief artist element. By the mid-1910s, almost every page was hand-lettered, with a text box surrounded by sophisticated artwork.

There was considerable repetition of the artwork from one year to the next, though to mitigate this a given image would often be printed in a different palette. However, over time, new images gradually replaced older ones. Whereas the 1912 calendar reused 51 of the 52 weekly pages in the 1911 calendar, the 1917 calendar only retained 17 of the 1911 images. Sometimes, artwork would be reused, but with new text in the center box.

The quotations were almost certainly compiled by Paul Elder himself. The Impressions Calendars series reinforces your editor’s long-held conviction that Robert Louis Stevenson was Elder’s favorite author. For example, five of the twelve quotations in 1906 are Stevenson’s, as are eleven of the 54 in 1911 and 1912—no one else comes close. Other 19th-century authors who appear frequently include Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Edward Rowland Sill (professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley from 1874 to 1882). A survey of five calendars yields a total of 65 different authors and poets.

• 1
  New York Times, 3 December 1911, p804 ↩︎

Fred Warner Carpenter had an eventful life: secretary to a President, diplomat to Morocco and Siam (now Thailand). Between 1911 and 1914, he composed a number of poems about those places and his experiences there. In November 1914, Paul Elder published Carpenter’s collected poems as Verses from Many Seas. The poems are pleasant if simplistic, with few risks taken, and return often to the same poetic meters.

Frederick Warner Carpenter was born on 12 December 1873 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the son of Ira M. Carpenter, a farmer, and Eva Augusta Wright. The family moved to California when Fred was twelve, and he spent his teenage years on a ranch near San Luis Obispo. After attending public schools and a local academy, returned to the University of Minnesota to study law, and was admitted to the bar in Minnesota and California in 1898.¹New York Times, 6 March 1909, p1 He worked as a stenographer to Charles S. Wheeler at Bishop & Wheeler in San Francisco, before resigning to take the job that would launch his career: stenographer to federal judge William Howard Taft as he headed to the Philippine Islands as chairman of a commission to organize a civilian government. When Taft was installed as Philippines governor in 1901, Carpenter became his private secretary. Carpenter remained Taft’s secretary as he was appointed Secretary of War in 1904, then elected President of the United States in 1908.²Marquis’s Who Was Who in America, Volume V, 1969-1973, p117

On Taft’s first day as President, 6 March 1909, the New York Times described Carpenter as Taft’s “veritable shadow.” His long association with Taft came to an abrupt end on 27 May 1910, when Carpenter resigned his post in order to become Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Morocco. Officially, a White House statement said that “the appointment of Carpenter to Morocco was made on his own application to be relieved of the duties of secretary to the president, which had been so heavy upon him as to threaten his health. The president thought that as Morocco has a delightful climate the change of duty which this would afford was wise and consented to Carpenter’s resignation of this present position.” Behind the scenes, as reported by the Call, Taft was likely embarrassed by a statement Carpenter issued about embattled Interior Secretary Richard A. Ballinger, as well as the transmission of a list of congressmen that had met with Taft during a trip to the South. Essentially, Carpenter was being “kicked upstairs.”³San Francisco Call, 28 May 1910, p1

Carpenter was officially received by a representative of the Sultan two months later, on 27 July. In September 1912, he left Morocco to become Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Siam, which he held until November 1913.⁴https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/carpenter-fred-warner, accessed 28 Jan 2026 By 1917, he is working at the Mission Savings Bank at 16th and Valencia in San Francisco, perhaps as their attorney. By 1930, he appears to have retired.

Carpenter never married and had no children. He died on 27 August 1957 at his home in San Anselmo in Marin County, and is buried at the Kelseyville Cemetery in Kelseyville, Lake County, California.

In the printed checklists and indexes, Carpenter’s name is mistakenly given as Fred Carpenter Warner.

Updated 2026-10-08

• 1
  New York Times, 6 March 1909, p1 ↩︎
• 2
  Marquis’s Who Was Who in America, Volume V, 1969-1973, p117 ↩︎
• 3
  San Francisco Call, 28 May 1910, p1 ↩︎
• 4
  https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/carpenter-fred-warner, accessed 28 Jan 2026 ↩︎