The Langham Library of Humour

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Cover of "Mr Pickwick Is Sued For Breach Of Promise"
Cover of “Mr Pickwick Is Sued For Breach Of Promise”

When I first began work on Paul Elder & Company, I would stumble upon previously-unknown titles every few months. Twenty years later it’s rare to find a new addition to the list, but this week I received two unusual books in a series called The Langham Library of Humour: Charles Dickens’s Mr Pickwick Is Sued For Breach of Promise (number 1) and Robert Burns’s The Jolly Beggars (number 2). They are slender, fragile items, with attractive covers and color frontispieces. They are marked “San Francisco and New York,” which dates them to the 1906-09 period following the 1906 earthquake and fire that destroyed Elder’s bookstore and printing shop.

The books bear no resemblance whatsoever to the typical Tomoye press output: heavy floral dingbats and block-letter typography, unusual page size, lack of a colophon and not a tomoye in sight. Clearly these were printed in another shop for sale by Elder. Several years earlier, Elder had published other series with similar outside provenance: the Panel Books, Impression Classics and the Abbey Classics.

Jolly Beggars cover
Cover of “The Jolly Beggars”

These two books appear to have been first published in 1907 by Siegle, Hill & Company at 2 Langham Place in London, which would explain the “Langham Library” moniker. The “G. Ross Roy Collection of Robert Burns” lists The Jolly Beggars as issued “in cream-colored boards, stamped in gold and blind.”

In North America, at least one other publisher issued these same titles with the same cover art: the Musson Book Company Ltd., Toronto. It seems likely that the books were printed in London by Siegle Hill & Co., but issued simultaneously by all three publishers.

The Langham Library of Humour apparently started and ended with these two titles: I have been unable to find mention of any others.

Frontispiece and title page of "Mr Pickwick"
Frontispiece and title page of “Mr Pickwick”
Frontispiece and title page of "Jolly Beggars"
Frontispiece and title page of “Jolly Beggars”
"Mr Pickwick," page 7
“Mr Pickwick,” page 7
"Jolly Beggars," page 9
“Jolly Beggars,” page 9

The PPIE Bookstore

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A small advertising pamphlet about the PPIE booth
Elder’s booth at the PPIE

The Panama-Pacific International Exposition was a big deal for Paul Elder & Company. He published eleven books on or about the fair, and he also had a handsome bookstore booth inside the Palace of Liberal Arts. Please follow the above link for photographs and other details!

How many PPIE books did Elder publish?

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Paul Elder & Co. published twelve titles directly or indirectly related to the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Each title below is preceded by its checklist number.

11. The Architecture & Landscape Gardening of the Exposition
16. The Art of the Exposition
46. California and The Opening of Gateway Between the Atlantic and the Pacific (not published until 1916)
47. California, a Poem
54. Catalogue De Luxe of the Department of Fine Arts, Panama-Pacific International Exposition (two volumes)
106. The Fourth-Dimensional Reaches of the Exposition
109. The Galleries of the Exposition
126. Holland, An Historical Essay
162. Little Bronze Playfellows
197. Nature and Science on the Pacific Coast
227. The Palace of Fine Arts and Lagoon
278. The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition

Additionally, Elder published two books for the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego, which opened just a few weeks after the PPIE and stayed open a year longer:

12. The Architecture and Gardens of the San Diego Exposition
271. The San Diego Garden Fair

 

Nature and Science on the Pacific Coast

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Cover of "Nature and Science on the Pacific Coast"
Cover of “Nature and Science on the Pacific Coast”

This week’s spotlight, Nature and Science on the Pacific Coast, makes a fine bookend to last week’s A Yosemite Flora. They are the only two pure science books that Paul Elder published, but what wonderful science books they are.

One of Elder’s eleven books on or about the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, Nature and Science is a comprehensive natural history of the West Coast, primarily California, with additional articles in the field of literature, fine arts, law, and travel. The list of contributors includes botanist Harvey Monroe Hall (author of A Yosemite Flora), architect John Galen Howard, engineer Joseph LeConte, and astronomer A. O. Leuschner.

Nature Science title
Frontispiece and title page of “Nature and Science on the Pacific Coast”

The editor-in-chief was Joseph Grinnell (1877-1939), director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, and a famous name to any zoology student at the University, including yours truly. Grinnell was the inventor of the “Grinnell System,” a method of meticulous note-taking that is still taught to every UC Berkeley zoology student to this day. Notes must be taken in the field from direct observation, to be followed by a detailed journal entry transcribed from the field notes. Any specimens must include the precise date, location, weather, and if possible, photographs. The method even specifies the quality of notebook (durable), paper (high) and ink (very black, and waterproof). Grinnell’s goal was that the notes could be readable 200 years into the future.

Nature Science JGrinnell1904
Joseph Grinnell in 1904.
Nature Science map2
Fold out map of San Francisco, with the PPIE fairgrounds prominently marked at top middle.

Included in the book are many fold out street maps of the major coastal cities: Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, and one large coated map of the California “life zones”.

Nature Science p31
Pages 30-31 of “Nature and Science on the Pacific Coast”
Nature Science map1
Large fold out map of California “life zones,” which today we would call “biomes” or “ecosystems”

A Yosemite Flora

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Cover of "Yosemite Flora"
Cover of “A Yosemite Flora”

In 1912, the field guide was still a fairly new kind of book. The first modern field guide was Birds Through an Opera-Glass, written in 1890 by Florence August Merriam (1863-1948). The first botanical field guide in the United States was the 1893 How to Know the Wildflowers, by Mrs. William Starr Dana (Frances Theodora Parsons, 1861-1952). The public was clearly eager for these new field guides, as Parsons’s first printing sold out in five days, and she published several subsequent editions.

Harvey and Carlotta Hall’s 1912 field guide A Yosemite Flora is a work of the highest academic quality. Paul Elder published several “armchair nature” books, notably Bird Notes Afield by Charles Keeler, but this is the botany book that Keeler might well have carried in his back pocket while traipsing through the Sierras. It is profusely illustrated with 170 drawings and eleven plates (though due to a production error many copies were issued without plates 2-11, and contain an errata slip to that effect).

Frontispiece and title page to "A Yosemite Flora"
Frontispiece and title page to “A Yosemite Flora”

Harvey Monroe Hall (1874-1932) was born in Illinois but grew up in Riverside, California. He received his Ph.D. in botany in 1906 from the University of California, Berkeley, writing a thesis entitled The Compositae of Southern California. He remained on the UC faculty until 1919, when he joined the Carnegie Institute. There he began an exploration of experimental methods of plant taxonomy. In 1929 he came Acting Professor of Botany at Stanford University.

Hall was a painstaking investigator, and his work became the basis for a fresh approach to organic evolution. He had spent 1928 in Europe studying the national parks there, and his returned an enthusiastic proponent of a new model of ecological management, the wildlife preserve.

Page 46-47 of "A Yosemite Flora"
Page 46-47 of “A Yosemite Flora”

In 1910 Hall married Carlotta Case (1880-1949),  a 1905 graduate of the University of California and a collector of western ferns. They had one daughter, Martha Hall Niccolls (1913-1991).

Shortly after Hall’s death, the Harvey Monroe Hall Research Natural Area was established within Inyo National Forest, just north of Tioga Pass in Yosemite National Park. It was one of the first RNAs to be created.