david – Page 8 – Paul Elder & Company

Errors of Thought

16 February 202413 April 2016 by david

This book is surely the strangest that Paul Elder ever published. It is the antithesis of the attractive, well-printed, easily-read giftable volume that was the Elder specialty. Without a doubt a vanity publication, Errors of Thought in Science, Religion and Social Life (1911) is a long, rambling, incoherent screed on education, science, history, religion, and politics. It’s also poorly typeset, printed on coated stock, and published without a stiff binding. Two states have been seen, the second including an errata page which is just as incomprehensible as the main text. Indeed, it is difficult to understand why Paul Elder was willing to put his name on this bizarre book. And who was the author, identified only as “St. George”?

The story of St. George begins with George Hugo Malter (1852-1927) who immigrated to the United States from Silesia (then in Germany, now part of Poland) in 1866. Malter made his way to California and became a mining engineer, but by 1879 he had abandoned engineering to become a grape grower and winemaker. He proved a successful vintner, and by 1900 Malter owned one of the largest vineyards in California at over 2000 acres. He was a member of the Bohemian Club and the owner of the Emerald, a well-known yacht. The village around his home base in Fresno County was named Maltermoro (today a residential neighborhood of Fresno known as Sunnyside).

The Maltermoro manor house (courtesy Fresno Public Library)

The winery’s main brand was called “St. George,” and it specialized in aperitif and dessert wines: Pale Dry Sherry, Dry Sherry, Sherry, and Mellow Sherry; Ruby Port and Tawny Port; Golden Muscat and Muscatel; Madeira and Grenache; Tokay, White Port, and Angelica.

In 1904, Malter married Mabel Pearl Richardson (1882-1967), a San Francisco native. He was 52, she was 22; it was the first marriage for both of them. It is the 29-year-old Mabel who is the author of our book, taking her pseudonym from the winery’s flagship product. In 1914, Mabel wrote another eccentric book, The World Process, this time self-published by the “St. George Publishing Company.”

The St. George Vineyard at Maltermoro (courtesy Fresno Public Library)

The draconian restrictions of Prohibition took a huge toll on the St. George winery. By the time George Malter died in 1927, all that was left was a small acreage and the manor house. Their son George Jr. (1906-1979) took the reins of the winery, which limped along until 1942, when it was purchased by the the Eastern wine enterprise L. N. Renault & Sons. Sadly, nothing at all remains of the Maltermoro estate. The site is now the Torrey Ridge apartment and town home complex.

By 1930, the widowed Mabel had managed to marry the wealthy Henry Clifford Fowler Stuart (1864-1952) and was living in the quiet Thousand Oaks neighborhood of Berkeley, California, about a mile north of the University. Henry was a retired railroad executive, mining engineer, real estate investor, and author. He had been director-general of the Guatemala Central Railroad, the U.S. Vice Consul General in Guatemala City 1885-86, and the U.S. Consul General in Guatemala City in 1893. Mabel had found her soulmate, it seems: Henry Stuart was as eccentric as she was. By the early 1940s, he had dropped his given names and was calling himself “Stuart X.” Despite the “X”, Stuart was nationally known and obituaries were printed in newspapers across the country when he died in 1952. His obituary in the Oakland Tribune is worth printing in full:

Henry Clifford Fowler Stuart, aka Stuart X (1864-1952)

BERKELEY, May 23. Funeral services will be held tomorrow afternoon for Stuart X, historian, scholar and self-styled philosopher, who died at his home on Wednesday. The funeral is schedule for 1pm at the Chapel of the Flowers at Adeline Street and Ashby Avenue.

Mr. X, born in Brooklyn in 1864 and named Henry Clifford Fowler Stuart, left his own obituary. In it he said he dropped Fowler “as he grew strong enough,” Clifford because no one would use it, and Henry because there were too many “henerys” and annexed an X “to mark his unknownness.”

He prepared the obituary from an entry in the 1942-43 “Who’s Who in California” several years ago and had it printed on a small card. He distributed some of these cards to his friends at that time, but this unusual act, his widow [Mabel] said, caused no alarm because of his originality in other matters.

He described himself as “recorder of his now passing race” and also as a prophet, psychologist (long before the term became respectable), philosopher, philologist, economist, biologist, and individualist.

He stated he left school at 14, “escaping further education,” and “lost 30 years on the other people’s busyness.” He was author of two works, which he lamented, he “had to print and distribute himself.”

A son of California pioneers, he was a land agent for the construction of the Panama Canal and reorganized the bankrupt Salvador Railway Company.

His aspiration, according to his own obituary, was to avoid “in carne re-nating.”

At some point after Stuart X died, Mabel and George Jr. moved to Indiana, where George became a real estate broker. Mabel died in 1967 at the age of 85. In a final bizarre family twist, her son George Jr. died in 1979 when he accidentally shot himself in the leg and bled to death. Both Mabel and George Jr. are buried at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis.

The Universal Order

21 July 202019 March 2016 by david

Friederika Quitman was born in 1844 at Monmouth, her family’s mansion in Natchez, Mississippi. She was the youngest daughter of General John A. Quitman and Eliza Turner Quitman, both of whom died when she was a teenager. She and her siblings inherited the estate, but it was attacked in 1862 by Union forces and the furnishings were sold or stolen. In 1863, at the age of 19, Frederika married Francis Eugene Ogden (1835-67), a Confederate officer; they had no children. Upon Francis’s early death at age 32 Friederika became ill, probably with clinical depression. She continued to live at Monmouth, until the mid-1870s when she relocated to Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. It was here she began keeping a diary, writing about nature, philosophy, great literary works, and her own illness. By the turn of the century her health had improved, and on New Year’s Day 1903 she married Austin Williams Smith (1843-1911), a widowed Confederate veteran and cousin of her first husband. They spent their final years at Smith’s Saragossa plantation near Natchez. Friederika died in 1911, four months after her husband.

Title page of "The Universal Order" — Title page of “The Universal Order”

Friederika did not publish her diary during her lifetime. It was her niece, Eva C. Lovell, who selected entries from her aunt’s journal (covering the years 1887-93) and arranged for publication with Paul Elder. Lovell also wrote the “Biographical Sketch” on pages ix-x, signed “E. C. L.” Following that is an Introduction by “H. L. J.”, identity unknown.

Page 3 of "The Universal Order" — Page 3 of “The Universal Order”

Elder published the book in brown paper over boards with gilt embossed printing on the cover, and matching dust jacket. The colophon does not identify the artist who designed the title page and chapter decorations.

Sonnets of Spinsterhood

21 July 202021 February 2016 by david

In 1915, the poet Snow Langley was 36 years old and unmarried: a “spinster” in the thankfully now-obsolete parlance. Spinning wool was typically the job of unmarried women, and spinster was used in legal documents as early as the 1600s to denote an unmarried woman who was likely to stay that way. One might think, then, that a book entitled Sonnets of Spinsterhood would be full of bitterness about years of loneliness. However, a better indication of what lies ahead is in the subtitle: A Spinster’s Book of Dreams: Delicate Traceries of Dim Desires. Langley writes in her introduction:

These Sonnets need, perhaps, a word of explanation. In a recent reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, the conviction was borne in upon me that the sentiment of love is worthy of expression, whether or not it outwardly finds an object; “for the romantic passion” as a dream, an ideal or a memory is a source of inspiration in every human life. I have endeavored to make the sequence of sonnets show the ideal progress from the personal to the racial, from the love which seeks individual expression to the love for humanity.

Title page of "Sonnets of Spinsterhood" — Title page of “Sonnets of Spinsterhood”

The book is bound in lavender paper, highlighting the personal, feminine nature of the content. The beautiful decorations are by Audley B. Wells, whom Elder used in a number of his publications.

Nannie Snow Longley was born in Ohio in 1879. Her family moved to California some time after, and she graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1896, where she gave the valedictory address, a historical narrative entitled “The Ballad of Lady Mary.” She left the ranks of spinsterhood at the age of 49 when she married Grant S. Housh in 1928; they had no children. For many years she was an English teacher at Los Angeles High School, where one of her students was the future science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury; he credited her with instilling in him a love of poetry. She died in 1963 and is buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Introductory "Proem" — Introductory “Proem”

Page 14-15 of "Sonnets of Spinsterhood" — Page 14-15 of “Sonnets of Spinsterhood”

PPIE Ephemera

21 July 202014 February 2016 by david

In addition to his books, Paul Elder & Co. produced a large amount of ephemera: greeting cards, postcards, catalogs, bookmarks, etc. Here is a small sampling of ephemera featuring the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

Part of the small handout advertising Paul Elder's booth at the PPIE — Part of the small handout advertising Paul Elder’s booth at the PPIE

Verso of the small handout advertising Paul Elder's booth at the PPIE, showing the shop's location — Verso of the small handout advertising Paul Elder’s booth at the PPIE, showing the shop’s location in the Palace of Liberal Arts

The Fourth-Dimensional Reaches of the Exposition

29 September 20247 February 2016 by david

In the early 19th century, mathematicians such as Joseph-Louis Lagrange and William Rowan Hamilton began exploring fourth dimensional space. By mid-century, the idea that time was the fourth dimension began to appear in literature. It was Edgar Allan Poe who first wrote that “space and duration are one” in his 1848 essay Eureka. James Clerk Maxwell, famous for mathematically describing how light, electricity, and magnetism were all facets of the same underlying phenomenon, was also a poet. In 1878, a year before his death, he wrote “Since all the tools for my untying / In four-dimensioned space are lying, / Where playful fancy intersperses / Whole avenues of universes.” In his 1888 book A New Era of Thought, mathematician and science fiction author Charles Howard Hinton coined the term tesseract for the fourth-dimensional analog of a three-dimensional cube. (The term was famously borrowed in 1963 by Madeleine L’Engle in her novel A Wrinkle In Time.) Soon many authors, including such luminaries as Marcel Proust, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde and H. G. Wells began writing about the fourth dimension: sometimes evoking geometry, but usually equating it with time.

Green leather binding with gold printing. Image courtesy Jean Rodgers.

In The Fourth-Dimensional Reaches of the Exposition (1915), Cora Williams takes her stab at the mysteries of the fourth dimension, broadly invoking the monumental scale of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition’s fairgrounds.

The human mind has so long followed its early cow-paths through the wilderness of sense that great hardihood is required even to suggest that there may be other and better ways of traversing the empirical common. So it is that the fear of being proclaimed a Brazenhead has restrained me until this eleventh hour from telling of my discoveries concerning the fourth-dimensional reaches of our Exposition.

Cora Williams in 1930, at her school in the Berkeley hills. — Cora Williams at her school in the Berkeley hills, as pictured in the 1930 *Spiral* yearbook.

This is indeed an odd little book. Williams writes with a florid mysticism:

While many books have been written descriptive of the Exposition, none has succeeded in accounting completely for the joy we have in yonder miracle of beauty. … There is still a subtle something not spatialized for consciousness. Length, breadth, and height do not suffice to set forth the ways of our delight in it. … Obviously to give it extension we shall have to ascribe to reality other dimensions than those of our present sense-realm. … Although the scientist has found it useful on occasion to postulate the fourth dimension, he has not thought necessary as yet to put it in the category of reality; much less has the layman.

Title page of "The Fourth Dimensional Reaches" — Title page of “The Fourth Dimensional Reaches”

Later, Williams muses about the beginning of life on Earth:

All we need in order to come to a fourth-dimensional consciousness, said Henri Poincaré, is a new table of distribution … a breaking up of old associations of ideas and the forming of new relations. … Lester Ward speculates that life remained aquatic for the vast periods that paleontology would indicate; Cambrian, Silurian, Devonian and Carboniferous—a duration greater than all subsequent time. Life was not able to maintain itself on land until it had overcome this one-dimensional limitation. … A venturesome Pterodactyl was who first essayed to make his way among the many obstructions to be found ashore! By what intuition was he impelled?

Frontispiece of "The Fourth Dimensional Reaches" — Frontispiece of “The Fourth Dimensional Reaches”, artwork by Gertrude Partington, poetry by Ormeida Curtis Harrison

In the title chapter, she discusses the Fair itself, undoubtedly becoming the only Elder author to use the word “hyperspace”:

The Panama-Pacific International Exposition is best seen in its fourth-dimensional aspect when approached through the Gateway of Memory. This is what one might expect, for that entrance alone has the requisite geometrical structure. You will recall having head, I am sure, how in the fourth dimension a person may go in and out of a locked room at his pleasure with bolts and bars untouched. Broad and open as is this Gate of Memory, when you pass its portals the wall closes behind you; there is no visible opening to mark the spot of your entry. A feeling of detachment comes over you. This is augmented by the burst of light and color that flashes across the field of your vision, and for the first time you understand the purport of those ‘banners yellow, glorious, golden’ which ‘do float and flow.’ They seem to bear you on breezes of their own creating to the freedom of outer spaces. What you had taken for the flauntings of festivity are become the heralds of hyperspace.

Page 4 "The Fourth Dimensional Reaches" — Page 4 “The Fourth Dimensional Reaches”

During her lifetime, Cora Lenore Williams (1865-1937) was known primarily as an educator. In 1917 she acquired the John Hopkins Spring mansion in Berkeley, which she turned into the Institute for Creative Development (later Cora Williams Institute), a fancy school specializing in languages, poetry, music, and literature. Williams also wrote one other book for Paul Elder, As If (1914).

Frontispiece artist Gertrude Partington Albright (1874-1959) was born in Heysham, England and received artistic training from her father, the artist John H.E. Partington. Her family moved to San Francisco, California in 1880. She returned to Europe to study at the Academie Delecluse, and later opened a studio at 220 Post Street where she did her painting and printmaking. She married artist Herman Oiver Albright in 1917 and joined the faculty at the California School of Fine Arts where she taught until her retirement in 1946. She exhibited at the Salon International des Beaux Arts, Carnegie Institute, Corcoran Gallery and the 1915 Panama Pacific Exhibition where she was awarded a bronze medal for painting.

Ormeida Curtis Harrison (1875–1947) was a poet and assistant principal at the A-to-Zed school in Berkeley. She was second wife of author and naturalist Charles Keeler. Her poem “Time Is” appears on the tissue guard between the title page and frontispiece.