One of the most collectible titles in the Paul Elder catalog, Yosemite Legends (1904) is also one of the best illustrated. Thirteen original tonalist illustrations by Florence Lundborg, combined with Native American themes makes this a very attractive book indeed.

Florence Lundborg (1871-1949) was a native of San Francisco. She studied with Arthur Mathews at the School of Design in San Francisco, and won a gold medal in the life class at the Mark Hopkins Institute. She also spent several years at the Whistler Academy in Paris (1897-1900). She was a member of Les Jeunes, the eclectic, bohemian group of writers and artists involved with Gelett Burgess’s magazine The Lark, for which she illustrated several covers and posters. The Lark was published by William Doxey, the bookseller for whom Elder worked before striking out on his own. Lundborg is also known for her pen-and-ink illustrations for Doxey’s edition of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

On 18 October 1904, Paul Elder hosted a soirée in celebration of the publication of Yosemite Legends,  including an exhibition of Lundborg’s original artwork for the book (see photograph below). I wonder where all those images are now? It’s all too possible that they were lost in the earthquake and fire of 1906.

In contrast to Lundborg’s notoriety, the author Bertha Smith has faded into obscurity—I can find no information about her at all. If you know anything about Ms Smith, I would be most grateful.

Cover of "Yosemite Legends". The same binding in green is known to exist, but is much less common.

Title page of "Yosemite Legends"

"Yosemite Legends," page 3

Plate from "Yosemite Legends". The woman is calling for her lost lover Koosookah

"Pohono, Spirit of the Evil Wind," from "Yosemite Legends"

Invitation to the opening of Florence Lundborg's original artwork for "Yosemite Legends," 18 Oct 1904

In 1902 Oliver Herford, Ethel Watts Mumford and Addison Mizner wrote a book of witty updates of popular sayings (one example: “people who love in glass houses should pull down the blinds”). The book was packaged into calendar form, entitled The Cynic’s Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1903, printed by the Twentieth Century Press and published by Elder & Shepard. The New York Times reviewed the book on 10 January 1903:

Oliver Herford, Ethel Watts Mumford and Addison Mizner have prepared an attractive little nonsense book in spite of its pessimistic title (The Cynic’s Calendar of Revised Wisdom for 1903, Elder & Shepard, San Francisco, 75 cents) very startlingly bound in warm red calico with two black cats conventionally intertwined to give it finish. Some of the wisdom smacks of bitterness, which even for a cynic is not nice, but others of their distorted proverbs make clever reading. Indeed, the very first sentiment that ushers in the New Year is one that is doubtless echoed by the majority of mankind: “God gives us our relatives; thank God we can choose our friends.”

Nonetheless, the Cynic’s Calendar was a huge success and spawned seven sequels and one compilation.

Many of Paul Elder’s authors were obscure and quickly forgotten, but this was not the case with Herford, Mumford and Mizner.

• Oliver Herford (1863-1935) was a British-born writer, artist and illustrator who is sometimes called “the American Oscar Wilde.” He often wrote for the magazines Life, The Mentor, and Ladies Home Journal. His younger sister Beatrice Herford was a humorist, actress and vaudeville performer in England.
• Ethel Watts Mumford (1878?-1940) was an American author and artist. Her parents were wealthy and gave her a fine education, including studying painting at the Julian Academy in Paris. She divorced her first husband when he became intolerant of her writing career, and swore not to remarry unless the new gentleman accepted her career. She married Peter Grant in 1906 and for a while wrote as Ethel Watts Mumford Grant before reverting to her original byline.
• Addison Mizner (1872-1933) was an American architect famous for his Mediterranean and Spanish Colonial resorts in Florida. He was one of the most famous architects in America in the 1920s. He was born in Benicia, California and apprenticed with Willis Polk despite the lack of formal architectural training. Addison’s brother Wilson Mizner was manager of The Brown Derby restaurant in Los Angeles, and they were involved in a series of scams and misadventures that inspired Stephen Sondheim’s musical Road Show.

In his memoir The Many Mizners, Addison tells the story of the making of the calendar. It is amusing enough that I have included it here in full. Our story begins in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he has been living for many months. He is almost broke, which apparently was not unusual:

Steamer day was the bright spot in the week, and one forgot his feuds in seeing new faces and getting news from the mainland. Hardly a steamer landed that did not bring people with letters of introduction and although they paid for carriages one had to do something for them, and this shaved my purse to a splinter.

One steamer day a most lovely young woman arrived. She had the usual letter, introducing Mrs Ethel Watts Mumford to me. She had with her, her aunt, Mrs Morrow, and cousin Ethel, and last but not least the “hell child,” her son of about seven. He was a terrible brat, but Ethel Mumford was so gay and attractive that even this handicap did not fend me off. She had just been divorced and wanted to be an author and was looking for local color. It was not long before she had the islands by the tail, for she thought the natives more interesting than the missionaries’ offspring.

She took a house at Waikiki, on the beach, and any moonlight night you could hear native music and see dimly the hula under the coconut trees, with a long cloth laid under the hoawa trees for a luau.

All this so scandalized respectability that at any odd time the acetylene lights would flash on the scene, and finding nothing worse than a native feast, would blink out in disappointment. Curiosity became so keen that, finally, the more advanced came to call. At first they warned politely that one did not mix with the “Kanaka” as a social equal, but many stayed to do a little mixing themselves.

Ethel had too much sense of humor to be considered sentimental. We swam all day, feasted, and learned the hula, and Honolulu was split in twain with those that were shocked and those that were curious and defended the cause.

One day I twisted an old adage to fit the time, and Ethel came back with a quotation from Oliver Herford. We began twisting all the old saws and bringing them up-to-date.

It was nearing Christmas time, and Ethel suggested that we get out a calendar like the Shakespeare ones of the period, where you tore off a quotation each day, only we were to use our twisted aphorisms instead.

We got 365 together and sent them to Elder & Shepard in San Francisco to be printed for our Christmas presents. Elder wrote back and asked us if he could publish it for sale, with a few cuts. The cuts brought our one a day down to one a week, for this was the beginning of the 1900s and the things the editors cut out would be sewing circle stuff today. But, we thought it would be fun and we got up a design, with a gingham cover, and illustrations and sent back the dummy of the Cynic’s Calendar by Ethel Watts Mumford, Oliver Herford and Addison Mizner.

The very first “crack” in the damn thing cost me plenty, for I had said: “God gives us our relatives; thank God, we can choose our friends.” I moulted a couple of rich old aunts on the instant.

Oliver Herford had never heard of me and got fussy and resented our using his name and thought he should get 90% of the royalties. As Ethel and I didn’t expect any return, we didn’t pay much attention to his squawks; besides, we had only used two or three of his jolts, and had done all the work, both as to designs and contracts. We thought a third was fair enough for him. Imagine our shock when the first royalty checks came in and we found that we had made over $1500 apiece!

–from The Many Mizners, by Addison Mizner. Sears Publishing, 1932.

Many of the pen-and-ink drawings in the calendars are signed “Towanda”. Similar drawings in later calendars are signed “Ethel” or “E W Grant”, so “Towanda” was clearly Mumford’s nom de plume. In addition, each of the sayings can be attributed to one of the three authors by means of the accompanying monogram (see photographs below); Mumford’s monogram is a “T” for “Towanda”. If anyone knows more about the name “Towanda” and why Mumford used it, I would be grateful to hear of it.

Cover of the 1903 calendar

1903 Calendar for the week of July 1st, with an aphorism by Oliver Herford and an "O" monogram

1903 Calendar for the week of July 12th, with an aphorism by Addison Mizner and his "AM" monogram

1903 Calendar for the week of December 27th, with an aphorism by Ethel Watts Mumford and her "T" (Towanda) monogram

Cover of the 1904 calendar

Title page of the 1904 calendar, with a drawing on the left by Ethel Mumford signed "Towanda"

Cover of the 1905 calendar

Cover of the 1906 calendar

Cover of the 1907 calendar

Cover of the 1908 calendar

Cover of the 1909 calendar

Title page of the 1909 calendar, with drawings by Ethel Mumford signed "E W Grant" and "E W G"

Cover of the 1910 compilation "The Complete Cynic"

Cover of the 1917 "revived" calendar

On 1 March 1899, Paul Elder and Morgan Shepard published “a monthly leaflet of book-notes” entitled Personal Impressions. After about six issues in leaflet form, the publication was upgraded to a monthly magazine format in March 1900, with cover artwork by Morgan Shepard. In September 1900 the magazine was renamed Impressions and given a new cover design. In March 1902 the magazine, with another new cover, was renamed Impressions Quarterly and publication was reduced to four issues per year. In March 1904 the cover was redesigned for a final time. The final issue of Impressions Quarterly was in December 1905.

Through all the changes, the contents remained fairly steady: an interesting mix of articles (usually excerpts from a book that Elder wished to highlight that month), criticism, artwork and advertisements (for both Elder’s publications and other San Francisco businesses).

The inaugural issue of "Personal Impressions", March 1899. One folded sheet, printed on the only recto of each leaf.

The August 1900 issue of "Personal Impressions," after expansion into magazine format

October 1900 issue, now renamed "Impressions"

December 1903 issue, now renamed "Impressions Quarterly" and issued four times per year.

June 1904 issue of "Impressions Quarterly," showing the final cover redesign

Last week’s spotlight was the final book ever published by Paul Elder & Company; this week’s is the very first. The new firm of “D. P. Elder and Morgan Shepard” published By the Western Sea in 1898. The green cloth cover features an ocean wave design that wrapped around the spine onto part of the back cover. I find the design very attractive, but it appears that Elder never used that effect again on a book cover. The book was printed at the Murdock Press, a firm that often printed Elder & Shepard’s publications before the creation of the Tomoye Press in 1903.

Samuel Marshall Ilsley was a Santa Barbara poet and playwright. Elder and Shepard knew him through Shepard’s wife, Mary Putnam. Ilsley was a friend of Mary and her sister Katharine Hooker (author of Wayfarers in Italy), and accompanied Katharine and her daughter Marian on a long trip to Europe in 1896.

Cover of "By the Western Sea", with wraparound decoration

Title page of "By the Western Sea"

The House in Mallorca (1950), by Ernest Ingold, is the last book ever published by Paul Elder & Company, and the only one published after Paul Elder Sr’s death in 1948. It describes the purchase of Junipero Serra’s birthplace, in the village of Petra on the Spanish island of Mallorca, by the Rotary Club of San Francisco in 1931. The Club subsequently deeded the property to the City of San Francisco in 1932 “to erect an imperishable bridge of friendship between Spain and California.” The book was published in a limited edition of 950 copies, and is decorated with many fine block engravings by Mallette Dean.

Title page of "The House in Mallorca"

Further reading: The Rotarian, December 1950, pp 18-21.

Next week: the very first book every published by Elder & Shepard.

One of Paul Elder’s most collectible titles, Palace of Fine Arts and Lagoon (1915) has often been described as Bernard Maybeck’s only book. It is a slim volume though, coming in at just 24 pages. In it Maybeck describes his approach to designing the Palace of Fine Arts, perhaps his most recognizable building and the only surviving structure from the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The text is a revised version of a speech that Maybeck gave to the Commonwealth Club of California. The introduction by Frank Morton Todd, official historian of the Exposition, is as florid and grandiose as Maybeck’s speech is thoughtful and subdued.

In addition to the orange wraps shown below, this title was also issued in a deluxe version with gilt-embossed dark-green leather over boards.

Cover, "Palace of Fine Arts and Lagoon"

Frontispiece and title page, "Palace of Fine Arts and Lagoon". (Not shown: tissue-guard with printed poem)

"Palace of Fine Arts and Lagoon", page 10

I recently found online a digitized version of The Graphics Arts and Crafts Year Book 1908 (Republican Publishing Company, Hamilton Ohio; Joseph Meadon, editor), which has several examples of John Henry Nash’s typographical work at the Tomoye Press. See pages 122 through 134.

Beginning in 1902, May E. Southworth wrote a series a cookbooks for Paul Elder, each containing one hundred and one recipes. Elder, who enjoyed giving most everything a special title, named the series “101 Epicurean Thrills”. They sold well and many were reprinted into the early 1910s. Most memorably, they each have whimsical cover artwork by an unidentified artist. Most commonly seen in paper wraps, each title was also sold in cloth over boards. The twelve titles are:

• 101 Beverages
• 101 Candies
• 101 Chafing-Dish Recipes
• 101 Desserts
• 101 Entrées
• 101 Layer Cakes
• 101 Mexican Dishes
• 101 Oyster Recipes
• 101 Salads
• 101 Sandwiches
• 101 Sauces
• 101 Ways of Serving Oysters

In 1914, Southworth followed up the series with a cookbook entitled Midnight Feasts: 202 Salads and Chafing-Dish Recipes.

101 Candies

101 Chafing Dish Recipes

101 Desserts

101 Entrees

101 Mexican Dishes

101 Salads

101 Sandwiches, with the 1902 version of the cover artwork. This may be the earliest book in the series, as I haven't seen any other title with this cover style.

101 Sandwiches with the revised cover artwork, in cloth over boards

Paul Elder & Co is now on Facebook and Twitter!

• Facebook: search for “Paul Elder & Company” (a unique URL will be available a little later)
• Twitter: @paulelderbooks

It would taken the pen of a Carlyle to describe our mysterious flight over Paris at midnight. The impression was so startling that for an hour we never spoke above a whisper.

George Eli Hall’s story A Balloon Ascension at Midnight is one of my favorite publications from the Elder & Shepard years. Gordon Ross’s color illustrations, including several of Notre-Dame cathedral, immediately sweep the reader back to the Belle Epoque. The book was published in two bindings: paper on boards (below), and green suede with gold trim on boards.

Cover of "A Balloon Ascension at Midnight"

Frontispiece of "A Balloon Ascension at Midnight". The sculpture is the famous "Le Stryge" on the parapet of Notre-Dame cathedral.

The balloon catches in a tree

The balloon soars over the Arc du Triomphe