Spotlight

A Book of Hospitalities and a Record of Guests

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Book of Hospitalities cover
Cover of “A Book of Hospitalities”

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.

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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.

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Frontispiece of “A Book of Hospitalities”
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Foreword of “A Book of Hospitalities”

 

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Text of “A Book of Hospitalities”

 

Arthur Guiterman
Arthur Guiterman (1871-1943)

 

 

Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Sonnets XXI and XXII

 

Paul Elder “Postage Stamps”

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The seven known stamps used by Elder & Shepard and Paul Elder & Company

Updated 22 August 2025

Pick up a book that was sold at Paul Elder’s bookshop, and open to the inside back cover. Quite often, in the lower-left corner, you will find—for want of a better term—a “postage stamp.” The size of an actual postage stamp and moistened in the same manner, they were affixed to many if not most of the books sold in the shop: not just Elder’s own publications, but all the other books too. They were probably affixed by the cashier at the till while wrapping up the book.

The earliest known stamp (A) dates from 1899, before Elder and Shepard began to use the tomoye. The significance of the arrow-and-seahorse design is unknown. At this time, Elder was still calling himself “D. P. Elder.”

Elder and Shepard began using the tomoye design in 1900, principally on the title pages of their publications. The earliest known example of the first tomoye stamp (B) is from 1901. 

Stamp C dates from 1902, when Elder began calling himself “Paul Elder.” This stamp was discovered in 2023 and is known from just this one example.

The Santa Barbara and San Francisco stores each had its own stamp, also known from just one example, now labelled D and E. The New York store may also have had a stamp, but this has not been seen.

Stamp F, featuring a tomoye surrounded by delicate tracery, had the longest lifespan; it has been seen as early as 1911, and as late as 1946.

By the 1950s, much had changed. Paul Sr. died in 1948, and Paul Jr. moved the bookstore to the corner of Sutter & Stockton. The company now used self-adhesive stickers (G) with a decidedly modern look to match the decidedly modern store.

 

Animal Analogues

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Animal Analogues cover
Cover of “Animal Analogues”

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.

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Title page of “Animal Analogues”

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Pages 10-11 of “Animal Analogues”

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Pages 14-15 of “Animal Analogues”

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Pages 20-21 of “Animal Analogues”

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Page 28 of “Animal Analogues”

How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers

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Cover of “How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers”

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.

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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.

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Title page of “How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers”

Although the cover says “Nature Series No. 23”, that name was concocted for this book and there are no earlier titles. Wood subtitled his 1908 sequel Animal Analogues as “Denatured Series No. 24.”

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.

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Page 16-17 of “How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers”

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Page 20-21 of “How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers”

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Page 28 of “How To Tell the Birds From the Flowers”