Extra, extra, read all about it! Wallace Irwin rewrites old fairy tales!
In contrast to Irwin’s Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum, whose humor is obscure to modern readers, his 1904 Fairy Tales Up-To-Now is fairly accessible. Irwin took standard fairy tales which everyone still knows today (Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, etc) and rewrote them in poetry, accompanied by hard-boiled newspaper headlines.
What I love best about Fairy Tales Up-To-Now is the unusual binding. The cover boards have been letterpress printed with actual newspaper articles—but without ink—resulting in a unique tactile feel. Paper labels were then pasted on top. The typography inside also mimics a newspaper look & feel.
Title page of “Fairy Tales Up-To-Now”
Update, 2 Feb 2014: Today Priscilla Anne Lowry of Lowry-James Rare Books showed me two copies with different stamped text on the boards. I checked both my own copy and an online image, and all four copies are different. It remains to be seen how many different cover states exist.
Update, 18 Apr 2020: Molly Schwartzburg comments below about how each cover is probably “flong” (a negative mold) leftover from printing newspapers, making each cover unique.
Guest books aren’t seen much today except at weddings and funerals. It seems they were more popular in the early 1900s, as Paul Elder published four guest books between 1904 and 1910.
Arthur Guiterman’s Book of Hospitalities And a Record of Guests (1910) was intended to be placed in the parlor, living room, or perhaps the guest bedroom. The first section (“A Book of Hospitalities”) contains a selection of sayings and epigrams for the house, and the second half (“A Record of Guests”) contains blank areas for the guests to write in. Guiterman was also involved in two other Elder publications: the 1908 guest book entitled (appropriately enough) Guest Book, and the 1907 humor book Betel Nuts, Or What They Say In Hindustan.
Title page of “A Book of Hospitalities”
Arthur Guiterman (1871-1943) was born in Vienna to American parents and graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1891. He was the author of a dozen books, primarily poetry. He was also editor of Women’s Home Companion and Literary Digest. In 1910, he co-founded the Poetry Society of America (which still exists and celebrated its centennial in 2010), and served as president in 1925.
I am particularly fond of Guiterman’s poem entitled “On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness”
The tusks which clashed in mighty brawls
Of mastodons, are billiard balls.
The sword of Charlemagne the Just
Is ferric oxide, known as rust.
The grizzly bear, whose potent hug,
Was feared by all, is now a rug.
Great Caesar’s bust is on the shelf,
And I don’t feel so well myself.
If you happen to own a copy of my 2004 Checklist of the Publications of Paul Elder, 2nd edition, you will see that the page borders are taken from Book of Hospitalities.
Frontispiece of “A Book of Hospitalities”Foreword of “A Book of Hospitalities”
Rear (L) and front covers of Wallace Irwin’s “Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum”
Question: of the 400+ books that Paul Elder published, which one sold the most copies?
The surprising answer is Wallace Irwin’s Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum. First published in 1901, this slim volume of jaunty verse remained in print at least through 1907. Fellow San Francisco humorist Gelett Burgess (of “Purple Cow” fame) added a mock scholarly introduction.
Title page of “Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum”
Wallace Irwin (1875-1959) was a well-known humorist in the early 1900s. He attended Stanford University where he edited two humor magazines, but was expelled for writing satirical poetry about the faculty. Soon after, Irwin was hired as a writer by the Hearst Corporation. (Getting kicked out of a university seems to have been a requirement for local humorists: Gelett Burgess was fired by UC Berkeley after pulling down a statue of Henry Cogswell. Burgess clearly saw a kindred soul in Irwin.)
Irwin’s humor has not aged well. In Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum, our hoodlum hero fancies a lady and attempts to win her favor, but neither Irwin’s slang nor his references will be familiar to today’s readers.
Prologue to “Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum”
Most disturbing to modern sensibilities, however, is Irwin’s racial humor. In Sonnet II below, he caricatures both Italians (“Dago”) and Jews (“Cohenstein”). More was to come: in 1907 Irwin began a long serial for Colliers magazine purporting to be the letters of a 35-year-old Japanese “boy,” going so far as to call the fourth volume Yellow Peril, and posing for the cover photograph himself in yellow makeup.
Sonnets I and II
Irwin wrote many other works, including the 1935 novel The Julius Caesar Murder Case, which is generally credited as the first mystery novel set in antiquity.
If you liked How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers, then you’ll love Animal Analogues. That’s what Paul Elder thought too, and so in 1908 he published Robert Williams Wood’s sequel to similar acclaim. As any author can tell you, sequels are notoriously difficult to write, but Wood pulled it off, with poetry and drawings to delight old and young alike.
The cover says “Denatured Series No. 24”, but the series began with How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers as #23, and Wood wrote no further books in this series.
Title page of “Animal Analogues”Pages 10-11 of “Animal Analogues”Pages 14-15 of “Animal Analogues”Pages 20-21 of “Animal Analogues”Page 28 of “Animal Analogues”
As with animated cartoons, the best children’s books are ones that satisfy both the children and the adults. Paul Elder published a number of innovative children’s books, but perhaps the most delightful is How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers by Robert Williams Wood, which appeared in 1907.
There is no traditional typesetting in the book; everything was drawn and lettered by Wood. Each page contains drawings of a bird (for example, the catbird) and a flower (the catnip), plus an amusing poem on how to distinguish them. It’s a perfect bedtime storybook.
The California quail is said
To have a tail upon his head,
While contrary-wise we style the Kale,
A cabbage head upon a tail.
It is not hard to tell the two,
The Quail commences with a queue.
Alternate binding of “How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers”
Robert Williams Wood (1868-1955) was a professor of physics at Johns Hopkins University from 1901 until his death. He specialized in optics and has been described as the “father of both infrared and ultraviolet photography”. In 1903, Wood invented an optical filter glass which allows ultraviolet and infrared light and pass through, but blocks most visible light. He used this special glass to make a device called a “Wood’s lamp,” for use in dermatology to diagnose certain skin conditions which fluoresce under ultraviolet light. Today we call these lamps “black lights,” though because of technology improvements black lights now use different filter materials in the glass.
Title page of “How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers”
Although the cover says “Denatured Series No. 23”, that name was concocted for this book and there are no earlier “denatured” titles. Wood continued the series in 1908 with Animal Analogues as Denatured Series No. 24, but he wrote no further books like it.
Instead, Wood co-wrote two prescient science fiction books with Arthur Cheney Train. The first, The Man Who Rocked the Earth (1915), is known for describing the effects of an atomic explosion thirty years before the first atomic bomb was created. Its sequel, The Moon Maker (1916), describes interplanetary space travel, including a plan to send a spaceship to destroy an asteroid that’s on a collision course with Earth.
Update, April 2017: In 1917, Dodd, Mead and Company copyrighted a new edition entitled “How To Tell The Birds From The Flowers, and Other Wood-cuts.” Your editor has seen a 19th edition of this title from 1939, so it was clearly a very popular title for Dodd Mead. Paul Elder was still publishing his own books in 1917, and it’s unclear how he lost the publishing rights.
Page 16-17 of “How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers”Page 20-21 of “How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers”Page 28 of “How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers”
