Paul Elder & Company – Page 28 – San Francisco bookseller & publisher, 1898-1968

Comfort Found in Good Old Books

27 January 202619 September 2010 by david

George Hamlin Fitch (1852-1925) was the San Francisco Chronicle’s literary critic and book reviewer from 1880 until his retirement in 1915. On 9 October 1910, his weekly Sunday column took on a far more serious subject than usual:

For the thirty years that I have spoken weekly to many hundreds of readers of The San Francisco Chronicle through its book review columns, it has been my constant aim to preach the doctrine of the importance of cultivating the habit of reading good books, as the chief resource in time of trouble or sickness … But it never occurred to me that this habit would finally come to mean the only thing that makes life worth living.

Fitch writes of his son’s death. *San Francisco Chronicle*, 9 October 1910, page 6

Fitch goes on to describe the death of his only son, Harold:

Cut off as I have been from domestic life, without a home for over fifteen years, my relations with my son Harold were not those of the stern parent and the timid son. Rather it was the relation of elder brother and younger brother.

Hence, when only ten days ago this close and tender association of many years was broken by death—swift and wholly unexpected, as a bolt from cloudless skies—it seemed to me for a few hours as if the keystone of the arch of my life had fallen and everything lay heaped in ugly ruin. I had waited for him on that Friday afternoon [30 September 1910] until six o’clock. Friday is my day off, my one holiday in a week of hard work, when my son always dined with me and then accompanied me to the theater or other entertainment. When he did not appear at six I left a note saying I had gone to our usual restaurant. That dinner I ate alone. When I returned in an hour it was to be met with the news that Harold lay cold in death at the very time I wrote the note that his eyes would never see.

You know not how much time you have, says Fitch. Use it well! Read the best books history has to offer.

And so, in this roundabout way, I come back to my library shelves, to urge upon you who now are wrapped warm in domestic life and love to provide against the time when you may be cut off in a day from the companionship that makes life precious. Take heed and guard against the hour that may find you forlorn and unprotected against death’s malignant hand. Cultivate the great worthies of literature, even if this means neglect of the latest magazine or of the newest sensational romance. Be content to confess ignorance of the ephemeral books that will be forgotten in a single half year, so that you may spend your leisure hours in genial converse with the great writers of all time.

Harold Fitch (1885-1910). *San Francisco Call*, 3 October 1910, page 3

In his article, Fitch does not mention how Harold died, but death and burial records make it clear that Harold Fitch died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The shock of his son’s death was bad enough, but having also to process his suicide, presumably without being willing to confide in anyone about it, must have been a struggle for the rest of George Fitch’s life.

In the weeks following Fitch’s article in the Chronicle, many readers asked him to list the great books that had proved so comforting to him in his sorrow. Fitch did so in his Sunday columns over the following weeks. In 1911, he gathered them together and published them under the headline of his original article, Comfort Found in Good Old Books. It proved a good seller for Paul Elder and was reprinted several times.

There is another aspect of the book worth highlighting. The New York Times reviewer, while noting that Fitch “is the best known and most highly esteemed [western] critic of current literature” and that the book would also serve “as a signpost out of the surging mass of current ephemeral literature,” also pointed out that Westerners feel compelled to talk about personal emotions. Here in the East, he is saying, we don’t display such delicate emotions, we suck it up:

*Comfort Found in Good Old Books*, along with two later Fitch volumes, *Modern English Books of Power* and *Great Spiritual Writers of America*, in matching “butterfly” covers

The detachment of the Pacific Coast from the rest of the country, and the way in which, to a rather marked degree, it is still thrown upon itself, strengthen very much this tendency toward a more intimate expression of thought and emotion. The Eastern reader of Mr. Fitch’s book needs to understand these peculiar conditions and influences under which it had its inspiration. Otherwise he may be surprised and perhaps repelled a little by the peculiar frankness and intimacy of the opening chapter, a tribute to the author’s only son, written a few days after the young man’s sudden death.¹

Fitch wrote several other books for Elder, including The Critic in the Orient, The Critic in the Occident, Great Spiritual Writers of America, and Modern English Books of Power. Like Comfort Found, each of these books were compiled from Fitch’s newspaper columns in the Chronicle.

George Hamlin Fitch was born in Lancaster, New York, a suburb of Buffalo, on 25 November 1852. His family moved to San Francisco when he was a young boy, but the family returned to New York in 1865, where he was educated at preparatory schools and Cornell University. His first newspaper job was at the New York Tribune, where he worked for three years. He returned to San Francisco in 1879 to work for the Chronicle, and quickly rose to become its literary critic.² In June 1881, he married Theodosia Hudson, also a native New Yorker. Their daughter Mary was born in 1882, and son Harold in 1885. George and Theodosia divorced about 1895, and Fitch lived on his own for most of the rest of his life. In 1910, he married Amerique B. Deussing, but this union appears to have been very short. After his retirement in 1915, he lived for a while in England and New York before settling in Arcadia, in Southern California, in 1920. At the time of his sudden death in 1925, he was living with a Mrs. Amelia White, but it’s not clear whether they were married. It was originally thought that he would be buried in the Fitch family plot at Cypress Lawn Cemetery in Colma, but perhaps due to Mrs. White’s desires, he was laid to rest at Live Oak Memorial Park in Monrovia.

Updated 2026-01-27

1
“A Book from a Man’s Heart,” New York Times, 3 September 1911, p532 ↩︎
2
San Francisco Chronicle, 25 February 1925, p3 ↩︎

Consolatio

2 November 202012 September 2010 by david

During Stanford University’s annual commencement on 25 May 1903, professor Raymond Macdonald Alden stood to read a poem. It was an ode dedicated to the members of the class of 1903 who had died that month. Consolatio is a sobering reminder of how, not so long ago, the sudden death of young men and women was an all too common event. It is easy to forget the roll of deadly diseases—measles, mumps, diphtheria, polio, typhoid, whooping cough, scarlet fever—that we have since largely eradicated.

Alden (1873-1924) was born in New York and educated at the University of Pennsylvania. He held junior positions at Harvard and George Washington University before accepting the post of assistant professor of literature at Stanford in 1899. He later became chair of the English department at the University of Illinois. Alden also wrote a Christmas story Why the Chimes Rang (1909). Forgotten today, it was once quite popular. It tells the story of church bells which ring every Christmas Eve whenever someone places a special gift on the altar.

Consolatio has been digitized by the Internet Archive and is available online in a number of different formats.

Interior of "Consolatio" — Interior of “Consolatio”

Patience And Her Garden

20 January 20265 September 2010 by david

Cover of "Patience Her Garden" — Cover of *Patience And Her Garden*

If you are looking for an exemplar of the Tomoye Press during its best years, the lovely booklet Patience And Her Garden (1910) will serve you well. It was printed in two colors on Spanish handmade paper, beautifully illustrated, pleasant if unmemorable content, readable in one sitting, reasonably priced at 35¢, and came with a matching envelope—in short, the perfect gift. How many copies of Patience were given from mother to daughter, from one society matron to another, or from a gentleman caller to a young lady he fancied?

The cover and title page show the unmistakable calling card of printer John Henry Nash: the mitred rule. Boxes such as these were difficult to set, but Nash was well-known as a technician. The frontispiece, by one of Elder’s favorite artists, Spencer Wright, was sold separately as Impression Leaflet #27, and also appeared annually in the Impressions Calendar series. The boxed quotation in the frontispiece, by Manx poet Thomas Edward Brown, neatly mirrors Nash’s title page with its own quote in a box.

Title page of "Patience Her Garden" — Title page and frontispiece of *Patience And Her Garden*

Ida Alberta Smith was born on 5 September 1863 in New York City, as a young girl moved with her family to Austin, Minnesota, a town founded by fur trappers only a dozen years before. Her father Hiram Smith worked as a blacksmith. In 1896, Ida married Levi William Decker; they had one daughter, Evaline, named after Ida’s mother. Ida Smith died on 7 July 1914, at just fifty years of age; she had been ill for some months. Her obituary reads in part: “She was one of Austin’s best women. She loved the home and her literary work, and few were as talented as she. She was very reticent, but gave freely of her literary work to social gatherings, being a member of the Stoddard Club, also the Birthday Club.”

I have no information about the connections enabling a “reticent” yet literary woman in a small Minnesota mill town to be published by Paul Elder in San Francisco.

Updated 2026-01-19

Yosemite Legends

16 November 202329 August 2010 by david

One of the most collectible titles in the Paul Elder catalog, Yosemite Legends (1904) is also one of the best illustrated. From the cover and title page to the text pages and the original plates, it’s a very attractive book indeed. While Florence Lundborg designed the cover, title page, and text using Native American themes (although her designs probably do not draw from the art of the Miwuk, Paiute, Kutzadika’a, Mono, or Chukchansi nations who live in the Yosemite area), her thirteen illustrations that accompany the stories are right out of the tonalist school of Arthur Wesley Dow.

The trade edition has three known cover states, and perhaps a fourth. The most commonly seen cover is red cloth on boards with a white waterfall. Much scarcer are green cloth with a white waterfall, and green cloth with a green waterfall. There are anecdotal reports of red cloth with a red waterfall, but this has not been seen. At least two special bindings are also known: leather on boards edition with special cover artwork, and a fine leather binding by W. Root and Sons, London.

Alternate green cover of "Yosemite Legends" — Alternate green cover of “Yosemite Legends” with white waterfall

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). Lundborg was a member of Les Jeunes (“the kids”), 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, who must have been quite proud of how the book turned out, hosted a soirée in celebration of the publication of Yosemite Legends, including an exhibition of Lundborg’s original artwork for the book (see invitation below). Sadly, her plates were lost in the 1906 earthquake and fire.

Alternate green cover of “Yosemite Legends” with green waterfall. Photo courtesy of Ulrich Hacker.

Author Bertha Henry Smith (1872-1922) was a Los Angeles-based magazine and literary writer. She was born in Olathe, Kansas, the sixth of eight children of grocery and produce dealer William Piper Smith and his wife Rachel Lavinia Kay Smith, both of whom were from Pennsylvania. Bertha never married and had no children. She died of breast cancer in 1922 at the age of 50.

Many thanks to Kol Shaver of Zephyr Used & Rare Books in Vancouver, Washington for information on Bertha Smith.

Alternate cover artwork with leather on boards

Special leather binding of “Yosemite Legends” by W. Root and Son, London

Title page of "Yosemite Legends" — Title page of “Yosemite Legends”

"Yosemite Legends," page 3 — “Yosemite Legends,” page 3

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

"Pohono, Spirit of the Evil Wind," from "Yosemite Legends" — “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 — Invitation to the opening of Florence Lundborg’s original artwork for “Yosemite Legends,” 18 Oct 1904

Cynic’s Calendar of Revised Wisdom

1 April 202522 August 2010 by david

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 1903 Cynic’s Calendar was a huge success. It wasn’t high-class literature, but it helped pay the bills. Elder published six more calendars through the year 1909, and followed that with The Complete Cynic, a 1910 compilation of the best quips from the seven calendars. Finally, a Revived Cynic’s Calendar was published for 1917.

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

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. He died of a heart attack, age 60, and is buried in the Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, California. 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.

Ethel Katherine Watts Mumford Grant (1876-1940) was an American author and artist. She was born in New York to a wealthy family who gave her a fine education, including studying painting at the Académie Julien in Paris. In 1894, Ethel married George Dana Mumford, but divorced him in 1901 when he became intolerant of her literary career. She swore not to remarry unless the new gentleman accepted her as a professional writer. In 1906, she married Peter Geddes Grant, and for a while wrote as Ethel Watts Mumford Grant before reverting to her original byline. She is buried at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.

Oliver Brooke Herford (1863-1935) was a British-born writer, artist and illustrator who is sometimes called “the American Oscar Wilde.” When he was a teenager, his father, a Unitarian minister, moved the family to Chicago. He attended Antioch College in Ohio, then later the Slade School in London and the Académie Julien in Paris. He lived in New York City for most of his life and was a longtime member of the Players Club, as was Elder’s partner Morgan Shepard. Herford wrote for magazines such as Life, Punch, Century Magazine, The Mentor, and Ladies Home Journal, and also wrote many plays. In 1904, he married Margaret Regan, who was also an author and playwright. They both died in 1935 and are buried at the North Cemetery in Wayland, Massachusets. Oliver’s younger sister Beatrice Herford was a humorist, actress and vaudeville performer in England.

In his memoir The Many Mizners, Addison Mizner 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.

All the Cynic’s Calendars, from 1903 through to 1917, are all the same size, 4 x 5-3/4″ with fabric-covered boards. The fabric was not identical for each copy of the same year’s calendar: your copy may well be different from the fabric in the photos below. I have included photographs of some alternate fabric covers. The 1903 and 1904 calendars are identical except for the calendar listings at the bottom of each page. All the other calendars, however, have their own designs.

There exists a special edition of the 1904 Calendar customized for the Cortez Cigar Company of Savannah, Georgia. Each page verso, labelled “Memoranda” and blank in the trade edition, include a slogan about Cortez Cigars. Four of the pages (within the months of April, July, October, and December) include only artwork; on these versos, the edition includes the Cortez Cigar “For Men of Brains” logo. The “finis” page also includes an address where the reader may order more copies of the Cortez Edition.

The 1910 “Complete Cynic” is not a calendar, but a selection of the aphorisms and artwork from the seven calendars.

All the artwork is by the three authors, most of it by Mizner and Mumford. All of the art & witticisms can be identified by means of the accompanying monogram (see photographs below). Mumford’s monogram was a “T” for “Towanda,” her nom de plume, though some of her artwork is instead signed with her name. If anyone knows more about the name “Towanda” and why Mumford chose it, I would be grateful to hear of it.

Some of the artwork was later made into a set of “Cynic’s Postcards.”

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

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

Frontis & title of the 1904 calendar, with the Cortez Cigar insert

Comparison of the trade & Cortez Cigar editions, page June 5-11

1904 Calendar, Cortez edition, page following Oct 9-15, with the Cortez logo on the verso

1904 Calendar, Cortez edition, “finis” page with address where more copies may be ordered

1905 calendar with different cover fabric

1907 calendar with different cover fabric

1908 calendar with different cover fabric

1908 calendar with yet another cover fabric

Perfectly Good Cynic 1909 perpetual cover — 1909 calendar with different cover fabric

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 1910 compilation “The Complete Cynic”