November 2017 – Paul Elder & Company

Title page of "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," Elder & Shepard, 1902 — Title page of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” Elder & Shepard, 1902

Book series that gather and reprint public domain fiction have a long history. Perhaps the earliest series was Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill, founded by British publisher John Bell in 1777. Later British series included Routledge’s Railway Library (1848–99) and the Everyman’s Library (1906-). A well-known American example is the Modern Library (1925-70). Book series were a familiar sight at any turn-of-the-century bookstore.

Paul Elder published several such series. The first and largest was the Impression Classics in 1902, just one of the many items in the Elder catalog to bear the “Impression” name. There were thirty-six titles in the series, as listed in Elder’s 1904 Catalog From a Western Publisher (catalog C20):

Impression Classics. A selected series of the shorter gems of literature. Beautifully printed on deckle-edged paper, with title page in two colors and etching frontispiece on Japan vellum. Bound in flexible grained lambskin with original design. Boxed. $1.25 net.

Title page of “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” Paul Elder & Company, 1904

Selections from Marcus Aurelius, by Marcus Aurelius
Selections from Fénelon, by François Fénelon
Reflections and Moral Maxims, by François de La Rochefoucauld
Letters to His Son, by Lord Chesterfield
Friendship and Love, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Heroism and Character, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sweetness and Light, by Matthew Arnold
Virginibus Puerisque, by Robert Louis Stevenson
Poor Richard’s Almanac, by Benjamin Franklin
Wit and Wisdom of Sidney Smith, by Sydney Smith (misspelled “Sidney” on the cover and title page)
Milton, by Thomas Babington Macaulay
Sir Roger de Coverley, by Joseph Addison
Old Christmas, by Washington Irving
Rip Van Winkle and Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving
Rab and His Friends, and Marjorie Fleming, by Dr. John Brown (misspelled “Majorie” on the cover and title page)
A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
Sonnets From the Portuguese, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, by Edward Fitzgerald
Enoch Arden, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Vision of Sir Launfal, by James Russell Lowell
Selections from Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, by Thomas Gray
The School for Scandal, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
She Stoops to Conquer, by Oliver Goldsmith
Addresses and Anecdotes, by Napoleon Bonaparte
Selections from the Prose of Honoré de Balzac, by Honoré de Balzac
Poems of Sentiment, by Lord Byron
Some Fruits of Solitude, by William Penn
Will o’ the Mill, by Robert Louis Stevenson
Men and Women, by Robert Browning
The Destruction of Pompeii, by Edward Bulwer
Golden Wings, by William Morris
Evangeline, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Selections from Epictetus, by Epictetus
The Holy Grail, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Selected Poems, by John Boyle O’Reilly

The five different cover designs and three different colors of the Impression Classics series

The Impression Classics series was published twice: in 1902 by Elder & Shepard, and again in 1904 by Paul Elder & Company. The title page (see photographs above) is the easiest way to distinguish them, but in some cases the cover design also is an indication. As was the case with other series published by Elder, instead of printing the books at the Tomoye Press he bought the sheets elsewhere. In the case of Impression Classics, the sheets are known to come from H. M. Caldwell’s Remarque Edition of Literary Masterpieces series, first published in 1900. For example, the frontispiece and text of title #18, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, is page-for-page identical to the Remarque Rubaiyat. Only the title page and cover designs are Elder’s. While the 1902 printings read “Printed by The Stanley-Taylor Company, San Francisco” and the 1904 printings read “The Tomoyé Press, San Francisco,” this refers only to the leaf containing the title and printer’s name, and that bearing the half-title. Caldwell’s name is not mentioned anywhere in the Elder imprints. There are at least 57 titles in the Remarque series, but Elder only purchased 36 of them. I have not seen enough copies to know whether all 36 titles were issued both in 1902 and 1904, but my guess is that Elder bought some of Caldwell’s titles in 1902, then added others in 1904.

“Poems of Sentiment” in cover designs A and E

There are five known cover designs, which I have labelled A-E (see photograph). Covers A, B, and C were almost certainly designed by Morgan Shepard, and are the only covers which have been seen on the 1902 imprints. Cover D was designed by Spencer Wright (cited in Catalog From a Western Publisher), strongly suggesting that Cover E is Wright’s as well. It’s unknown whether there was any logic behind why a given title appears with a given cover design. Some titles are known to have appeared in multiple covers: for example, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard has been seen in Covers C and D, and Poems of Sentiment in Covers A and E.

There were also three different colors of leather: brown, green, and red. However, over the decades many green covers have faded to brown, sometimes leaving only a smudge of green on back cover or on the inside surfaces of the covers along the edge of the endpapers (note the fading in the Cover C example in the photograph above). The title pages are in two colors and include one of two tomoyé designs, depending on whether the title is the 1902 or 1904 printing. There is a half-title page containing the text “Impression Classics.” Many copies have endpapers containing strips of bark, something Elder used in a number of his other publications. The leather is good quality and has held up reasonably well, much better than the Panel Books, for example. The books were sold in unmarked boxes, protected by an unmarked glassine dust jacket, neither of which typically survive.

In December 2020, I was able to identify the frontispiece artist, previously known only by the signature “AD MARCEL,” as French artist Adrien Marcel. All of the frontispieces in the series are by Marcel, though not all are signed by him; of the eighteen titles I have seen, only ten are signed.

Unadorned box and glassine dust jacket of "She Stoops to Conquer" (green cover) — Unadorned box and glassine dust jacket of “She Stoops to Conquer” (Cover B, brown)

Some of the titles include a short introduction or “prefatory remarks,” usually anonymous. The signed introductions that have been seen so far are:

Chesterfield’s Letters To His Son (#4), by “J. H. F.,” identity unknown
Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat (#18), by “M. K.” (Michael Kearney). Kearney was a Persian scholar who, in addition to the long (33 pages) introduction in the book, also translated many of Khayyam’s quatrains.
O’Reilly’s Selected Poems (#36), by William A. Hovey. Hovey (1841-1906) was a newspaper editor in Boston, and evidently a good friend of the poet.

I would like to thank Roger Paas for details about both Michael Kearney and Caldwell’s Remarque Edition series.

Close-up of the frontispiece from "Golden Wings" — Close-up of the frontispiece from “Golden Wings,” signed by Adrien Marcel

Cover of "Elizabethan Humours" — Cover of “Elizabethan Humours,” with cover artwork by Henry R. Johnson

The introduction to Elizabethan Humours and the Comedy of Ben Jonson begins:

“The Stanford English Club issues this little book in connection with, and in commemoration of, the presentation of Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour at Stanford University in March, 1905.

“This is one of a series of presentations of old English plays in the Elizabethan manner, the first of which was the revival of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, in March, 1903. The enthusiastic reception accorded this effort encouraged the English Club to preserve the Elizabethan stage built for the play, so that it might be permanently available for such presentations, and to invite Mr. Ben Greet and his company of English players to come to Stanford in the fall semesters of both 1903 and 1904. the Greet company produced, beside the old Morality play of Everyman, two Shaksperean [sic] comedies, Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing, and last of all, Hamlet–the second time in America that Shakspere’s greatest work has been produced in full and in the Elizabethan manner.”

Title page and frontispiece of "Elizabethan Humours" — Title page and frontispiece of “Elizabethan Humours”

The stage that the Stanford English Club built (see frontispiece at right) was modeled in part on the Swan Theatre as represented in a 1596 drawing reproduced in 1903’s Knight of the Burning Pestle. The stage extended directly to the “pit” where the “groundlings” (who had only paid for standing room) were gathered. The stage included a rear portion between two pillars, screened if necessary from downstage by a curtain called a “traverse,” and a upper balcony on the second floor.

After the introduction, the book contains several essays on Jonson and the Elizabethan era:

Elizabethan Humours, by Raymond Macdonald Alden (author of the Elder publication Consolatio)
Jonson’s Learned Sock, by Melville B. Anderson (1851-1933. Professor of English at Stanford University)
Upon Ben Jonson, a poem by Edmund Waller
Ben Jonson’s Prologue to Every Man in His Humour
Epilogue, written for the 1675 revival of Every Man in His Humour by Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset
Dickens and His Friends, from The Life of Charles Dickens, vol. 2, chap. 9, by John Forster, 1845 (Charles Dickens played the part of Captain Bobadil [see plate below] during an 1845 revival)
reproductions of portraits of Jonson, Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, David Garrick, and Dickens
A Satire on a “Paul’s Man”, from Virgidemiarum, Book III, Satire 7, by Joseph Hall, 1597
A Satire on Humours, from The Scourge of Villainy, Satire XI, by John Marston, 1598
Ode to Jonson, by Robert Herrick

Page 6 of "Elizabethan Humours" — Page 6 of “Elizabethan Humours”

Ben Jonson wrote Every Man in His Humour in 1598 as a “humours comedy,” in which each major character is dominated by an overriding humour or obsession. The play was probably performed for the first time by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1598 at the Curtain Theatre. Based on the playlist published in the 1616 folio of Jonson’s works, the part of Kno’well, the aged father, was almost certainly performed by William Shakespeare himself, who evidently enjoyed playing older characters.

"Bobadil," plate opposite page 6 — “Bobadil,” plate opposite page 6