Cover of "The Heritage of Hiroshige" with Japanese-style binding

Japanese connoisseurs are inclined to wonder at the fast-growing demand in the Occident for good examples of the art of ukiyo-ye color printing. Why, they ask, should Americans and europeans pay great prices for these prints when, for a little more money and the expenditure of a little more pains, they can buy original paintings—if not the very greatest artists, at least men whose productions are above the mediocre?

It is a curious little problem, but the solution is by no means difficult. We collect Japanese prints for the same reasonthat many of us prefer a coin of Syracuse to a relief by Phidias, Botticelli’s lovely drawings of children to his paintings, the Great Anthology to Oedipus, the Vita Nuova to the Divine Comedy. We love these things because they are simpler, nearer to ourselves than the masterpieces, because we cannot understand the greatest things.

The San Francisco firm of Paul Elder & Co. has obtained an enviable reputation by its publications of illustrated works on Japanese art.

Back cover of "Heritage of Hiroshige", with roundel of a dragonfly

So wrote reviewer “L. C.” in the New York Times on 15 September 1912 about Dora Amsden’s Heritage of Hiroshige. The book tells the story of Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) as seen through the art collection of John Stewart Happer (1863-1936). For Dora Amsden (1853-1947), it was her second work on Japanese art for Paul Elder, following Impressions of Ukiyo-ye in 1905.

This is a very handsome book, and the paper, binding, and art reproductions are high-quality. Although Elder was known for skimping on production costs for many of his books, he clearly did not do so here. Two different bindings are known (see photos).

Alternate binding for "The Heritage of Hiroshige"

L. C. finishes his Times review with a bleak portrait of Japan in 1912:

There is something very saddening about these books, now appearing so frequently, dealing with the old arts of Japan. It was only a little over a half a century ago that Hiroshige died, and in that half century Japan has become a “great power”—and has lots her arts, her poetry, her romance, and her happiness. Some Japanese are trying to organize a “revival” of the ancient arts of their country. It is a vain hope, a beating of the wind. Modern “civiliation” acts on art and on romance as a biting acid on a delicate substance, a miasma that withers and destroys. A hundred years ago the Japanese, despite the suppressions of the feudal system, were undoubtedly the happiest people in the world. Today the factories in their cities grind hundreds of thousands into neurasthenia and death more pitilessly than any cotton mill in the Southern United States. They are paying for their “progress”—and they are paying dear.

Title page of "The Heritage of Hiroshige"

"The Heritage of Hiroshige" p8-9

"The Heritage of Hiroshige" p36-7. The image is the well-known memorial portrait of Hiroshige by Kunisada

The gallery at Paul Elder's Post St store (1921-1948)

Can a bookstore also be an art gallery? If the bookstore was Paul Elder & Company, the answer was a resounding “yes.”

Elder had learned about the book business while working for William Doxey at his bookstore in the Palace Hotel on Market Street. But while photos of Doxey’s shop show nothing but books, Elder’s stores included a healthy dose of objets d’art: paintings, prints, pottery, metalwork. This was the influence of Morgan Shepard, Elder’s partner from 1898 until 1903. Shepard was both an author and an artist, and he decorated the original 238 Post store (1898-1903).

Art objects were for sale from the beginning, but it wasn’t until 1909 that Elder had a lecture hall/exhibition space within the bookstore. Both the 239 Grant store (1909-1921) and the 239 Post store (1921-1948) had gallery rooms. The photo at right shows the Post St gallery adorned with Asian prints.

How many exhibitions did Elder host? Very many. Years ago I started making a list of all the artists’ shows at the Paul Elder Gallery, but I gave up when the count grew past fifty. It seems that the gallery was never empty for long.

Cover of "Prosit". The motto "nunc est bibendum" comes from Horace's Odes, and means "now is the time to drink"

What better book for ringing in the New Year than a book of toasts? Prosit — A Book of Toasts (1904) was written by “Clotho,” but everyone knew this to be a pseudonym of the Spinner’s Club, a popular women’s club in San Francisco dedicated to encouraging creative genius is women.

Happy New Year to all from PaulElder.com! May you keep all your resolutions!

Alternate cover for "Prosit" with cloth ties

Title page of "Prosit". Frontispiece by Gordon Ross.

"Prosit", page 72-3

Happy Holidays to all!

Christmas Card #64, with poem by Agness Greene Foster. Circa 1909. Artist unknown.

Cover of "On the Laws of Japanese Painting"

One of the little joys of researching obscure century-old books is when the equally obscure author suddenly springs to life. So it was with Henry P. Bowie, author of On the Laws of Japanese Painting, published by Paul Elder in 1911.

The book is a more than just the laws of Japanese painting; it also discusses calligraphy, ink, animal and vegetable sources for different colors, signature seals, and even how to properly view the artwork (from a distance of one tatami mat, and not from a standing position). There are 65 plates (a very high number for an Elder publication). The production doesn’t quite measure up to the content: the typography feels too ‘industrial’ and printer John Bernhardt Swart peppers the text with florid ‘st’ and ‘ct’ ligatures.

Henry Pike Bowie (1848-1921) was born in Maryland, but his family moved to San Francisco soon afterwards. He studied law with the attorney Hall McAllister (after whom McAllister street in San Francisco is named). He seems to have done well for himself as a lawyer, but did even better for himself as a husband: in 1879 he married the wealthy and twice-widowed Agnes Poett Howard, retired from the law, and went to live with her at her estate “El Cerrito” in Hillsborough.

Title page of "On the Laws of Japanese Painting"

In the 1880s, Henry and Agnes approached Makoto Hagiwara to build a garden and tea house on their estate. (Hagiwara would later design the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for the 1894 California International Midwinter Exposition. He is also often credited with introducing America to the fortune cookie.) They named their garden Higurashi-en, meaning “a garden worthy of a day’s contemplation.” Among the signature plants is a silver-green, five-needled Mikado pine, said to be given to Bowie by Emperor Meiji. (The estate was subdivided long ago but the garden still exists at 70 De Sabla Road in San Mateo, although much reduced in size. The current owners purchased the neglected property in 1988 and have gradually restored it. The garden is now on the National Register of Historic Places.)

"Laws of Japanese Painting", page 1. The headband shows flowers and leaves of the peony.

When Agnes died in 1893, Henry Bowie took a trip to Japan, and enjoyed it so much he returned the next year. It was a turning point in his life: Bowie would subsequently live in Japan for extensive periods and become fluent in Japanese. He studied many aspects of Japanese culture, including painting and the Shinto religion. In 1905 Bowie co-founded the Japan Society of Northern California and served as the society’s first president (the other co-founder was David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University). In 1909, Bowie dedicated a memorial gate in the garden, designed by Sekko Shimada and Suikichi Yagi, and built by Japanese craftsmen brought over specifically for the project. The gate was designed to honor the valor of Japanese sailors and soldiers during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5.

In 1918, he sailed for Japan as special emissary of the U.S. Department of State. Shortly after returning in 1921, Bowie fell ill and died at the age of 72. When his will was read, all were shocked to learn that half the estate was left to his wife Komako Hirano, and his two sons Imao and Taweo. No one in California knew that Bowie had married and started a second family in Japan—although it was common knowledge in Japan and the Japanese newspapers ran prominent obituaries. Bowie’s stepson George Howard unsuccessfully contested the will in 1922.

"Laws of Japanese Painting", page 6-7. The design is leaves of the icho plant, placed in books to prevent bookworms.

"Laws of Japanese Painting", page 46-7. The art is the pattern known as "bamboo and the swelling sparrow"

"Laws of Japanese Painting", plates X and XI

Cover of "Impressions of Ukiyo-ye". At lower right are three kanji that read "ukiyo-ye"; followed by a tomoye with a 'roof', which has no meaning.

Japonisme was all the rage at the turn of the 20th century, and Paul Elder’s carefully constructed bookstore-as-art-object was, in many ways, built upon the Japonisme sensibility. Dora Amsden’s Impressions of Ukiyo-ye, published in 1905, was the first of several Elder publications about the art of Japan block printing. Elder was no doubt happy to use the double entendre “Impressions,” suggesting both hazy romantic views of Japan as well as the physical image of a printer pressing his paper to the stone. Indeed, Elder’s in-house magazine was also called “Impressions,” surely for the same reasons.

Impressions of Ukiyo-ye is bound in a Japanese style, with visible external cording on the spine. The book uses thin rice paper, printed on one side only with the pairs of leaves left unopened. Plates of ukiyo-ye scenes are inserted on white coated stock. The papers covering the inside of the boards contain pulped bark, a method that Elder used on several occasions.

Title page of "Impressions of Ukiyo-ye"

Amsden’s book was notable enough to warrant a review in the New York Times Book Review of 8 July 1905. However, reviewer Charles De Kay was not overly impressed. “Miss Amsden has good-will and certainly is far removed from the ordinary denseness which fails to understand an alien point of view; yet it can scarcely be said that she offers a new departure in the estimate of Japanese art.”

I can find little information about Dora Amsden (1853-1947). Her brother Charles Watson Jackson was the brother-in-law of Thomas Dykes Beasley, who wrote Paul Elder’s book “A Tramp Through Bret Harte Country”.

"Impressions of Ukiyo-ye", page 44

Cover of "Scientific Singing", with the author's EST monogram at lower right

In his book Scientific Singing, E. Standard Thomas wastes no time in getting to his point:

Do you realize that you can sing? Do you realize that to sing is a normal expression of your spiritual nature? Do you realize that song has a place in every life?

Clearly, Thomas was a singing teacher, and this book was his manifesto. In his next breath, he confronts your fears:

Why don’t you sing? Because I have no voice. Why do you say you have no voice? You have never proved it.

The real reason why you do not sing is because you do not appreciate the value singing will be to you. You do not realize that in your everyday life singing is of actual worth. Singing is not a great mystery. It is but the expression of ideas you are conceiving every day. The gift of song is possessed by all. It is within your grasp. You can appreciate it. You can attain it. You can express yourself in song.

Title page of "Scientific Singing", including a photograph of the author's studio

Edgar Standard Thomas—surely one of the best author names in all of Paul Elder’s catalog—was the son of Mr and Mrs J. W. Thomas of Berkeley. The San Francisco Call society pages of 6 August 1911 reported that “Mrs Thomas and her son, Edgar Standard Thomas, have returned to their North Berkeley home after an absence of two months in the east. The Thomas home, ‘La Loma,’ has been one of the show places of Berkeley for 30 years. Mrs Thomas recently built her son a studio overlooking San Francisco Bay.” (What a nice thing to have your parents build you a music studio!) A photograph of that studio appears on the frontispiece.

Scientific Singing, page 56-57

Cover of "The Call of the City"

What was urban life like 100 years ago? The technology we now take for granted was either absent or in its infancy: electricity, automobiles, telephones, radio, television. In my own mind I picture New York City or Chicago with its teeming immigrants, and still manage to conclude that urban life was much like it is now: huge numbers of people all trying to get ahead in the world.

Among the important social facts of urban life then: city dwellers were a minority. In 1908, 56% of Americans still lived in rural areas (by 1920 the urbanites were in the majority, and in 2008 only 17% of Americans were rural). Today we tend to think of city vs suburb, but in 1908 the distinction was city vs farm.

The Call of the City, Charles Mulford Robinson’s tribute to urbanity, is an unabashed love-fest of the creature comforts that civilization can offer. Robinson is careful never to directly insult the farmer. Instead, he compares the city man to the outdoorsman:

If now and then, on a wet day, the city does not seem attractive, one should draw up before his fire and read the journal of a lover of the country, of a hunter of a fisherman in his wilds. The writer will early tell how shabbily the weather treated him, and it is a safe guess that one will not be so saintly as not to smile when thinking of a contrast offered by the safe harbor of a city. … The journal rambles on, and before it is done with the weather one may be sure of a page or so on the delicious difficulty in making a fire; on the remarkable failure of this particular fire, when built, to warm both sides of the body at the same time equally; and of the early darkness and the consequent and admittedly, long and tiresome evenings when the weather is rainy. If you are human, you shift your feet on the ottoman and ring for William to turn on the steam heat.

(Lucky for our city dweller that he has a manservant named William!)

Charles Mulford Robinson (1869–1917) was one of the first urban planners and an advocate of the City Beautiful movement. He was Professor of Civic Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and wrote the influential 1901 book The Improvement of Towns and Cities.

Frontispiece of "The Call of the City" -- "Broad Street, New York" by Colin Campbell Cooper

My favorite chapter in the book is entitled “When Phyllis is in town”:

When Phyllis is in town the city is no longer austere and dignified. It becomes bewitching. Love is always full of sweet surprises, but at this time one may chance on a surprise at any moment and at any turn—for Phyllis may be there! … When Phyllis is in town, the windows of the florists tug at heart-strings and at purse-strings; the confectioners’ tempting trays plead sweetly for the little mouth; the windows of the milliners unaccustomedly attract, for in them are plumes, of which one may get on Phyllis’s hat … When Phyllis is in town, the music of her voice is in every tingle of the telephone, because—perhaps—she asked that it should ring … When Phyllis is in town, the world is such a great big funny spectacle for you and her to look at laugh at; and when she goes, it is such a dreary, solemn drama!

Title page of "The Call of the City"

Cover of "Bohemian San Francisco"

How many cookbooks start like this:

No apologies are offered for this book. In fact, we rather like it. Many years have been spent in gathering this information, and naught is written in malice, nor through favoritism, our expressions of opinion being unbiased by favor or compensation.

and then continue like this?

San Francisco! Is there a land where the magic of that name has not been felt? Bohemian San Francisco! Pleasure-loving San Francisco! Care-free San Francisco! … It was in Paris that a world traveler said to us: “San Francisco! That wonderful city where you get the best there is to eat, served in a manner that enhances its flavor and establishes it forever in your memory.”

So begins Clarence Edwords’s 1914 culinary history of the City By the Bay, Bohemian San Francisco. He starts by defining “Bohemia” as the “naturalism of refined people,” and the “protest of naturalism against the too rigid, and oft-times, absurd restrictions established by Society.” Edwords touches on each period of San Francisco history, each community of European and Asian immigrants, with recipes from most of them.

Title page of "Bohemian San Francisco". The photograph is of the Cobweb Palace, an old saloon at the corner of Francisco & Powell

Unsurprisingly, Edwords lavishes particular attention on seafood. (“The Bohemian way to have your clams is to go to the shore of Bolinas Bay or some equally retired spot, and have a clam bake.”) Bohemian San Francisco contains perhaps the earliest mention in print of the Crab Louie salad, and the book is credited with popularizing the Celery Victor salad (which was invented by Victor Hertzler, chef at the St Francis Hotel).

Though many—if not most—of Paul Elder’s publications have languished in obscurity, Bohemian San Francisco is one of a handful to be reprinted in recent decades. In 1973 it was published by the Silhouette Press, and in recent years by a number of on-demand publishers.

Page 18-19 of "Bohemian San Francisco," where Edwords describes the Cobweb Palace

Edwords’s approach to food is probably best summed up by the toast that appears at the beginning of the book:

Our Toast:

Not to the Future, nor to the Past / No drink of Joy or Sorrow / We drink alone to what will last / Memories on the Morrow / Let us live as Old Time passes / To the PResent let Bohemia bow / Let us raise on high our glasses / To Eternity — the ever-living Now

Cover of "Starr King in California"

“Starr King” was a famous name when Paul Elder published this volume in 1917. Today, one might say he was one of the most important Californians you’ve never heard of.

Thomas Starr King (1824-1864) was a Unitarian minister who became very influential in California politics. He was born in New York, and despite being forced to leave school to support his family, studied on his own and became a minister at the age of 20. In 1849 he became pastor of the Hollis Street Church in Boston and soon became one of the most famous ministers in the country. In 1860 he agreed to come to San Francisco and lead the First Unitarian Church. He was a passionate orator on behalf of the Union during the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln famously credited Starr King with preventing California from becoming a separate republic. He often campaigned to raise money for the United States Sanitary Commission (a predecessor to the American Red Cross); the travel took a toll on his health and he died in 1864 of diphtheria, just 39 years old.

Title page of "Starr King in California", showing a statue that still stands in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, near the De Young Museum

In 1913 Starr King’s fame was such that the California legislature enshrined him as one of California’s two honorees (along with Junipero Serra) in the United States Capitol’s Statuary Hall. In 2006, however, the legislature voted to replace Starr King’s statue with one of Ronald Reagan. State Senator Dennis Hollingsworth, displaying remarkable self-irony, said “To be honest with you, I wasn’t sure who Thomas Starr King was, and I think there’s probably a lot of Californians like me.” He also pointed out that Starr King wasn’t a native Californian, somehow forgetting that Reagan was born in Illinois and Serra in Mallorca. Starr King’s statue was removed in 2009 and now resides in the gardens of the state capitol in Sacramento.

"Starr King in California," page 56-57

Two streets in San Francisco are named after him: Starr King St., adjoining his Unitarian Church on Franklin St (the current building was built in 1889, long after his death); and King St., which borders AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants baseball club.

I have been unable to find much information about author and historian William Day Simonds (1855-1920).