Books – Page 19 – Paul Elder & Company

The Garden Book of California

21 July 20208 February 2011 by david

The most famous sentence about gardening from California’s Arts & Crafts period is “Hillside Architecture is Landscape Gardening around a few rooms for use in case of rain.” Often ascribed to the poet and naturalist Charles Keeler, the line appears not in The Simple Home, as is sometimes cited, but in an untitled 1906 pamphlet distributed by Berkeley’s Hillside Club. The pamphlet’s author is probably either Annie Maybeck or her husband, architect Bernard Maybeck, whose architectural drawings are used as the pamphlet’s illustrations.

Belle Sumner Angier’s Garden Book of California is cut from the same cloth. She certainly would have known of Keeler and Maybeck, and it’s reasonable to suppose that he urged her to write the book. Angier harps on many of Keeler’s favorite topics: bad architecture, regular exercise and the stresses of modern life. Here’s an excerpt from the chapter “Out-of-door Living Rooms”:

“Stay a great deal in the open air.” How frequently we hear the phrase in California, and how much we enjoy as individuals the carrying out of the advice, especially when we are so fortunately situated as to be able easily to avail ourselves of the privilege; yet, as householders, what little preparation is made for enjoying with any degree of regularity fresh air and brilliant sunshine! … We recognize the value of the daily sun-bath and of vigorous exercise in the open air, yet we plan our gardens all open to the street, leave our porches open to the rude gaze of every passer-by, persistently cramp our garden space with this or that crude building, buying fifty-foot lots and covering them withour badly contrived architecture; and this in the face of the fact that many of us have been ordered to California to live out-of-doors.

…

Oh, we are a decidedly inconsistent people! I could count on my fingers the well-planned arbors, summer-houses, covered seats, or even open and partially sheltered garden seats I have seen in my travels through the gardens of California. I do not even try to find a reason for this condition of affairs. There really couldn’t be any worth considering.

…

The hills of Italy cannot give a more artistic vantage-spot for the pergola than do those of California. Amalfi and Ravello, Naples or Florence, can show no more beautiful opportunities for this form of out-of-door architecture than beautiful Belvedere, or Berkeley, or Montecito, or San Buenaventura, Los Angeles or San Diego.

…

The common use of rustic work that is extravagantly artificial in character, the too often bizarre and unreal forms that are used in the making of garden-houses in some way seem to disturb the sense of harmony. And yet the garden-house, the arbor and the pergola may all be made so satisfying to family life—so important to American family life—since they offer inducements toward a measure of relaxation almost foreign to our people without which we shall continue to earn the title of the most nerve-worn nation of the earth.

Little is known about Belle Sumner Angier. She was from Los Angeles, and perhaps was a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Express.

Decorations for the book are by Spencer Wright.

Garden Book CA dj cover — Dust jacket of "The Garden Book of California"

Garden Book CA title — Title Page of "The Garden Book of California"

Garden Book CA p104 — "The Garden Book of California," page 104-5

Garden Book CA p106 — "The Garden Book of California," page 106-7

Stray Leaves

21 July 20208 January 2011 by david

In addition to books published under the Paul Elder imprint, the Tomoye Press also printed a number of vanity publications. Stray Leaves is a particularly handsome example. Author Mary Murphy has gathered poetry from various sources into this elegantly bound volume. I do not know the identity of the artist or bookbinder.

Stray Leaves cover — Cover of “Stray Leaves”

Stray Leaves title — Title page of “Stray Leaves”

Stray Leaves p96 — “Stray Leaves”, pp 96-7

The Great Small Cat and Others

12 January 202115 December 2010 by david

A decade after publishing her popular “101” cookbook series, May Southworth wrote The Great Small Cat And Others (1914), a collection of seven tales for cat lovers. Handsomely bound if unimaginatively typeset, the book is illustrated with eight sepia photographs. From an Arts & Crafts perspective, the book is notable chiefly for the decorations by artist Pedro J. Lemos (1882-1954), who was just becoming well known for his wood-block prints.

I dedicate this post to the memory of Fuller the Cat, who gave us six years of companionship and affection.

Here is short eulogy for Fuller on my blog. And here is a longer piece about Fuller that I wrote for the Kaddish Project.

Fuller onepaw large — Fuller the Cat, 1999 – Dec 10, 2010

Great Small Cat cover — Cover of “The Great Small Cat”

Great Small Cat title — Title page of “The Great Small Cat”

Great Small Cat poem — Poem from “The Great Small Cat”

Great Small Cat p8 — “The Great Small Cat,” page 8-9

Great Small Cat p61 — “The Great Small Cat,” page 61

California — A Poem

21 July 202022 November 2010 by david

Paul Elder published this beautiful booklet during the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. It’s a real gem, with striking full-color drawings by Audley B. Wells and a matching envelope.

Perhaps only after admiring the booklet do we notice the poem it contains, California, by Fred Emerson Brooks (1850-1923). Though Brooks and his poetry have been forgotten, he was very popular a century ago as a writer and speaker. Modesty, it would seem, was not one of Brooks’s character flaws. Billed in a promotional flyer as “The Man Who Never Disappoints, Always Smiling, Always There,” his Chicago publisher gushes:

Fred Emerson Brooks is one of the great men in the lyceum world … Phenomenal health, a clean life and a sunny nature give him a remarkable record. Brooks has a marvelous breadth of thought and expression—there is no passion or feeling he does not portray. He is a gifted orator with a voice ranging from that of thunder to the softness of a summer zephyr.

The flyer also includes endorsements from Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt (“I’ve heard Brooks, and he’s bully!”) and Taft.

California envelope — matching envelope to "California"

New Footprints in Old Places

27 October 20206 November 2010 by david

New Footprints cover — Cover of “New Footprints in Old Places,” with artwork by Rudolph F. Schaeffer

One of the most satisfying things about writing these weekly spotlights is discovering unusual books that are worth reading. Ruth Gordon, who wrote her 1977 Ph.D. thesis on Paul Elder, entitled one chapter “Books Beautiful, Literature Mediocre.” Indeed, many of Elder’s publications are forgotten for good reason. As a group, however, I find Elder’s travel books well worth a look.

Pauline Stiles’s New Footprints in Old Places (1917) chronicles her nine-month holiday in Italy. Nine months! How many of us have the wherewithal to take a nine-month vacation? Stiles was clearly from a well-to-do family. She and her two female companions left New York on 4 October 1913 and arrived in Naples on Friday the 17th. [The Naples-New York steamer route was heavily traveled by Italian immigrants. My grandparents came to America on the Naples steamer in 1910 and 1911. —ed.]

Stiles and her friends spent the next six months based in Rome, with excursions to Florence, Assisi, Pompeii, Capri, and most of the other sites that had become well-established tourist destinations. They left Rome on May 1st on a leisurely journey north, arriving in Paris on June 6th where they stayed for three weeks. Then two weeks in Belgium, spending their last night in Bruges on July 17th:

New Footprints title — Title page of “New Footprints in Old Places”

Bruges is like an old, old etching, with the same dim lights and shadows, and the same uneven lines. It is an enchanting medieval town that has let the years slip over it without ever growing modern. It seems asleep, the houses, the towers, the bridges, the canals flowing by flowering walls, and even the swans that drift upon the water.

The next day they arrived in London, which had been stirred like a hive of bees. On June 28th, Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip had assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo. On July 28, Austria-Hungary would declare war on Serbia, and the first hostilities of World War I quickly followed. On Sunday 2 August, Stiles writes:

We can talk and think of nothing but war. The whirlwind has swept on at incredible speed. Germany has broken the neutrality of Belgium, and France has gone to the aid of her ally, Russia. Everyone wonders what England, as the third of the Entente, will do.

Meanwhile the city is absolutely stunned. Great crowds swarm the streets, buying the latest extras. The air is rasped with the cries of the hawkers, and is electric with excitement.

Towards evening we rode down to Charing Cross. All the French in London were going home to join the army. The men were marching to the trains, waving good-bye to their women; eyes were dry but lips were trembling. A band was playing the Marseillaise. Every hurdy-gurdy in the city is grinding out that stirring tune.

New Footprints p134 — “New Footprints in Old Places,” page 134-5

Determined not to change her travel plans, Stiles journeys to Stratford-on-Avon:

The country is swarming with troops. Many horses in all the towns have been taken, and in Warwick every house is filled with soldiers, waiting their orders. Our landlady, Mrs London, entertained us with all the news as she served us our meals of boiled beef, boiled potatoes, boiled beans, boiled everything in her stuffy little parlor. The men are “Reservists” and “Territorials”; she has to take some in and “board and bed them for two shillings per head.” No one knows were the troops are bound for. I wonder if you realize how horrible this war is going to be.

In Liverpool on 26 August 1914, Stiles and her companions board a steamer for New York. Eleven hundred people are crowded onto a ship designed to hold nine hundred. “The ship is packed from top to hold; every place in the steerage taken, and conditions are ghastly down there.” Stiles, however, has the best stateroom on the ship. “Farewell, Old World,” she closes. “I have seen you in all your proud prosperity, at the summit of your civilization. You will never be the same again.”

New Footprints in Old Places was published in August 1917, with the Great War still raging. Many of the Flanders fields that Stiles visited on her way to London had been obliterated. Armistice would not be until 11 November 1918, still over a year in the future.

Pauline Stiles was born in Illinois on 14 March 1885, and moved with her family moved to San Bernadino, California, in 1889. Her father, William H. Stiles, was an obstetrician and was said to have “delivered about 90% of the pioneer valley babies.” After New Footprints in Old Places, she worked in the silent-picture-era Hollywood as a “critic of scenarios.” In 1927, she published her first novel, The Crooked Stick. More novels followed, including Red Pavilion, Lovers Must Live, and Cloud by Day. In 1949, she published Dr. Will, a biography of her father. Pauline Stiles never married and had no children. She died on 28 June 1957 at her home in San Bernadino. She was 71 years old.