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 35ยข, 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.
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