Spotlight – Page 4 – Paul Elder & Company

Poems

21 January 20241 September 2017 by david

Paul Elder published a lot of poetry in his career: of the 420 titles on the checklist, at least sixty-one (15%) are poetry. Alas, not much of it is good poetry. (In this Paul Elder was not alone: I have a friend who collects “bad poetry” from across the Arts & Crafts period.)

Irene Hardy’s Poems (1902) is likely a vanity publication, a limited edition of 300 printed by Charles A. Murdock. (As we shall see below, half of the edition was lost in a fire.) The binding and paper are of good quality, and the typography is typical of the period: crisp typeface but a small font, leaving excessive white space around the edges of the page.

The author’s name is consistently printed as “Irenè Hardy”: note the odd placement of the grave accent, which in French would normally be over the first E, “Irène.” Hardy’s poem “With the Field-Lark” was the featured supplement in the June 1902 edition of Impressions Quarterly, where her name is spelled instead with an acute accent: Irené. My theory is that Hardy eccentrically pronounced her name Irené (ee-re-NAY) and wanted her name spelled that way, but that Murdock mistakenly printed it as Irenè. (Hardy was not French; she was born in Ohio.)

Title page of "Poems" — Title page of “Poems”

Although Hardy’s verses may no longer be remembered, since her 1922 death Stanford University has held an Irene Hardy Poetry Contest (now called the “Clarence Urmy-Irene Hardy Prize for Poetry”).

The following obituary of Irene Hardy is from The Stanford Illustrated Review, Volume 23, Issue 9, June 1922, p467. “A little book of her verse” refers to Poems.

Irene Hardy, a student at Stanford from 1892 to 1895 and a member of the english department faculty from 1894 to 1901, died June 4 at her home, 453 Melville Avenue, Palo Alto, following an attack of pneumonia. She was born in Yellow Springs, Ohio, eighty-one years ago [22 July 1841] and for the last fifteen years had been totally blind. In spite of her handicap, she continued to write, publishing verse in the “Sunset” and other periodicals. To the last she retained the admiration and devotion of her former pupils and associates, both of Stanford and the Oakland High School, where she taught for twelve years before coming to Stanford. She began teaching at 16 years of age and alter taught in Antioch, Iowa, Preparatory School. In 1861, the opening year of the Civil War, she entered Antioch College, of which Horace Mann was first president. Because of failing health, she came to California in 1871 and remained here until here death. Miss Hardy was widely known as a poet. A little book of her verse was published in 1902 in San Francisco. Half of the edition was later destroyed in a bookstore fire and the remaining volumes were taken up by students. Among the poems included in the volume are “Ole for Forefather’s Day,” “1887,” “Ariel and Caliban,” “A Wedding Day Gallop,” and “Palo Alto Hills.” Her work later appeared in “The Overland Monthly,” “Sunset” and other periodicals. She was a pioneer in the educational field in California and had a lasting influence on the teaching of composition and literature.

Pages 12-13 of "Poems" — Pages 12-13 of “Poems”

San Francisco Through Earthquake and Fire

21 July 202018 April 2017 by david

One hundred and eleven years ago today, at 5:12 am local time, the great San Francisco earthquake struck. It lasted for 45 seconds, had an estimated magnitude of 7.8, and caused a great deal of damage, not only in San Francisco but up and down the California coast. In San Francisco, however, fire was greater evil. Several small fires, burning uncontrollably due to ruptured water mains, gradually merged, and over the course of three days destroyed about 80% of the city. Almost everything east of Van Ness Avenue was lost. San Francisco had suffered many fires in its history, but this was the Great Calamity, the dividing line between Old San Francisco and New San Francisco.

The earthquake and fire was one of the first large-scale disasters covered thoroughly by photographers, and a large number of books were rushed to print soon afterwards. Paul Elder published only two: The Vanished Ruin Era, and Charles Keeler’s San Francisco Through Earthquake and Fire (1906). Keeler writes in his usual florid style, including a moving dedication that dreams of a quick renaissance: “Hail, city of yesterday and tomorrow! I salute thee reborn, rejuvenated, casting the slough that unworthily envisaged thee, rising out of thy burned self to a more fair, more glorious realization of thy promise and thy destiny!” By 1909, the downtown area was mostly rebuilt, and Paul Elder had reopened a bookstore around the corner from his original location.

Title page of "San Francisco Through Earthquake and Fire" — Title page of “San Francisco Through Earthquake and Fire”

The book was published in brown wraps with an uncredited illustration of downtown San Francisco. The viewer is looking south on Kearny towards the intersection of Market Street. The Call Building (which survived, and is now called the Central Tower) is in white, at the corner of Market and Third.

The fold-out frontispiece showing the fire at its height

Plate X: The Old Palace Hotel succumbs to the fire — The Old Palace Hotel succumbs to the fire

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”