Spotlight

Paul Elder & Company is not generally known for “fine press,” but the 1907 series The Western Classics certainly qualifies. In my opinion, these are the highest-quality books that Paul Elder ever published. The set consists of four novels printed on fine Fabriano paper, bound in heavy beveled boards and vellum spines, with handsome slipcases, each in a limited edition of 1000. The format is the consistent, but each book has its own design and is set in a different typeface: Caslon 471, Bookman, Cheltenham Wide, and Scotch Roman.

The books could be had individually in a matching dust jacket and slipcase for $1.75, or individually “in a hinged case of heavy lacquered Japanese fibre stock” for the same price, or the set of four in a cabinet box of the same Japanese fibre stock for $6. The Western Classics remain one of the most collectible of Elder’s publications.

The Sea Fogs

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Sea Fogs is an excerpted chapter from his larger work, The Silverado Squatters, published in 1883 in Edinburgh, Scotland by Chatto and Windus. The “sea fogs” of the title refers to the morning fog bank visible from Stevenson’s cabin in the hills above Calistoga, in California’s Napa Valley:

The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops, though it was shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own mountain slope.  But the scene, beyond a few near features, was entirely changed.  Napa valley was gone; gone were all the lower slopes and woody foothills of the range; and in their place, not a thousand feet below me, rolled a great level ocean.  It was as though I had gone to bed the night before, safe in a nook of inland mountains, and had awakened in a bay upon the coast.  I had seen these inundations from below; at Calistoga I had risen and gone abroad in the early morning, coughing and sneezing, under fathoms on fathoms of gray sea vapour, like a cloudy sky—a dull sight for the artist, and a painful experience for the invalid.  But to sit aloft one’s self in the pure air and under the unclouded dome of heaven, and thus look down on the submergence of the valley, was strangely different and even delightful to the eyes.  Far away were hilltops like little islands.  Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the foot of precipices and poured into all the coves of these rough mountains.  The colour of that fog ocean was a thing never to be forgotten.  For an instant, among the Hebrides and just about sundown, I have seen something like it on the sea itself.  But the white was not so opaline; nor was there, what surprisingly increased the effect, that breathless, crystal stillness over all.  Even in its gentlest moods the salt sea travails, moaning among the weeds or lisping on the sand; but that vast fog ocean lay in a trance of silence, nor did the sweet air of the morning tremble with a sound.

Tennessee’s Partner

The popularity of Bret Harte (1836-1902) rests on his stories of the Gold Rush in California. Tennesee’s Partner first appeared in the October 1869 issue of the Overland Monthly, a magazine which Harte himself edited and published. One writer called it “one of the earliest ‘buddy’ stories in American fiction.”¹Martin Scofield, The Cambridge Introduction to The American Short Story, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p55. There is some evidence that the story is based on Jason Chamberlain and John Chaffee, two miners who lived together for over fifty years. In 1925, the San Francisco Bulletin ran a story connecting Harte’s story with Chamberlain and Chaffee, based on the account of a man who was a mining partner with them in 1865.

Tennesee’s Partner also inspired a number of Hollywood movies, including three silent films. In 1955, RKO released Tennessee’s Partner, starring John Payne, Rhonda Fleming, and future California governor and US President Ronald Reagan. The movie took substantial liberties with Bret Harte’s story line.

The Case of Summerfield

William Henry Rhodes (1822–1876) is known today primarily for this one story, published in two installments in the Sacramento Union newspaper 1871 under the initials “W.H.R.” The story concerns a man who invents a way to make water catch fire, and thus conceivably destroy all life on earth. Elder’s 1907 edition is the first time that the two halves of the story appeared as one unit. In 1950, The Case of Summerfield appeared in the Summer edition of Fantasy & Science Fiction, with editor Anthony Boucher calling Rhodes “one of the great pioneers of modern science fiction.”

Notably, the story also includes a character whose nickname is “Black Bart,” an alias adopted later by the “gentleman bandit,” stagecoach robber, and doggerel poet Charles Bolles. Alexander Robertson, whose bookstore on Stockton St. was right around the corner from Paul Elder’s, claimed that Boles/Black Bart had been a customer of his in the early 1880s.

A Son Of the Gods and A Horseman In the Sky

The scene of these two short stories by Ambrose Bierce (1842-1913?) is the American Civil War. This was a subject he knew all too well: Bierce joined the 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment when he was just nineteen years old, and fought in the 1861 Western Virginia campaign. Bierce was a horrified participant at Shiloh the following year, an experience that would serve as the basis for many of his later short stories. Both stories first appeared in the San Francisco Examiner newspaper (29 July 1888 and 14 April 1889, respectively). “A Horseman in the Sky” in particular has been widely anthologized and is one of Bierce’s best-known stories.

Updated 2025-12-22

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  Martin Scofield, The Cambridge Introduction to The American Short Story, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p55.