When a Californian calls something “old,” it’s usually not as old as something a Bostonian would call “old.” As a native Californian, I have often been reminded of this. “Well,” says my Easterner friend, “we wouldn’t call this ‘old’ back home.”
It turns out that this scenario is at least a century old, for it occurs on the very first page of The Lure of San Francisco:
“I believe you Californians have but two dates on your calendar,” he exclaimed, “for everything I mentioned seems to have happened either ‘before the fire’ or ‘in the good old days of forty-nine!’ ‘Good old days of forty-nine,’ ” he repeated, amused. “In Boston we date back to the Revolution, and ‘in Colonial times’ is a common expression. We have buildings a hundred years old, but if you have a structure that has lasted a decade, it is a paragon and pointed out as built ‘before the fire.’ “
The Lure of San Francisco is written as a long conversation between the narrator, a native San Franciscan woman, and her Bostonian guest. They visit the four principal sights of pre-1906 San Francisco: Mission Dolores, the Presidio, Portsmouth Plaza, and Telegraph Hill.
The book has a beautiful cover with a nautical motif, and is elegantly illustrated inside with eight tonalist drawings by Audley B. Wells. It was one of more than a dozen books Elder published during the Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
Cover of "The Lure of San Francisco"Title page of "The Lure of San Francisco""The Lure of San Francisco", page 8-9
For the thirty years that I have spoken weekly to many hundreds of readers of The San Francisco Chronicle through its book review columns, it has been my constant aim to preach the doctrine of the importance of cultivating the habit of reading good books, as the chief resource in time of trouble or sickness … But it never occurred to me that this habit would finally come to mean the only thing that makes life worth living.
So wrote George Hamlin Fitch (1852-1925) in the opening paragraph of Comfort Found in Good Old Books, a book he wrote in 1910 when his own son suddenly died:
Cut off as I have been from domestic life, without a home for over fifteen years, my relations with my son Harold were not those of the stern parent and the timid son. Rather it was the relation of elder brother and younger brother.
Hence, when only ten days ago this close and tender association of many years was broken by death—swift and wholly unexpected, as a bolt from cloudless skies—it seemed to me for a few hours as if the keystone of the arch of my life had fallen and everything lay heaped in ugly ruin. I had waited for him on that Friday afternoon [30 September 1910] until six o’clock. Friday is my day off, my one holiday in a week of hard work, when my son always dined with me and then accompanied me to the theater or other entertainment. When he did not appear at six I left a note saying I had gone to our usual restaurant. That dinner I ate alone. When I returned in an hour it was to be met with the news that Harold lay cold in death at the very time I wrote the note that his eyes would never see.
…
And so, in this roundabout way, I come back to my library shelves, to urge upon you who now are wrapped warm in domestic life and love to provide against the time when you may be cut off in a day from the companionship that makes life precious. Take heed and guard against the hour that may find you forlorn and unprotected against death’s malignant hand. Cultivate the great worthies of literature, even if this means neglect of the latest magazine or of the newest sensational romance. Be content to confess ignorance of the ephemeral books that will be forgotten in a single half year, so that you may spend your leisure hours in genial converse with the great writers of all time.
When many of Fitch’s readers asked him to list the great books that had proved so comforting to him in his sorrow, he wrote this book. It proved a good seller for Paul Elder and was reprinted several times.
Fitch wrote several other books for Elder, including The Critic in the Orient, The Critic in the Occident, Great Spiritual Writers of America, and Modern English Books of Power.
Title page and frontispiece of “Comfort Found in Good Old Books”
During Stanford University’s annual commencement on 25 May 1903, professor Raymond Macdonald Alden stood to read a poem. It was an ode dedicated to the members of the class of 1903 who had died that month. Consolatio is a sobering reminder of how, not so long ago, the sudden death of young men and women was an all too common event. It is easy to forget the roll of deadly diseases—measles, mumps, diphtheria, polio, typhoid, whooping cough, scarlet fever—that we have since largely eradicated.
Alden (1873-1924) was born in New York and educated at the University of Pennsylvania. He held junior positions at Harvard and George Washington University before accepting the post of assistant professor of literature at Stanford in 1899. He later became chair of the English department at the University of Illinois. Alden also wrote a Christmas story Why the Chimes Rang (1909). Forgotten today, it was once quite popular. It tells the story of church bells which ring every Christmas Eve whenever someone places a special gift on the altar.
If you are looking for an exemplar of the Tomoye Press during its best years, Patience And Her Garden (1910) will serve you well. It was well-made, beautifully illustrated, pleasant if unmemorable content, readable in one sitting, and reasonably priced—in short, the perfect gift. How many copies of Patience were given from mother to daughter, or from a gentleman caller to a young lady he fancied?
The cover and title page show the unmistakable calling card of printer John Henry Nash: the mitred rule. Boxes such as these were difficult to set, but Nash was well-known as a technician. Note how the frontispiece mirrors Nash’s title page with its own quote inside a box.
Cover of “Patience And Her Garden”Title page and frontispiece of “Patience And Her Garden”
One of the most collectible titles in the Paul Elder catalog, Yosemite Legends (1904) is also one of the best illustrated. From the cover and title page to the text pages and the original plates, it’s a very attractive book indeed. While Florence Lundborg designed the cover, title page, and text using Native American themes (although her designs probably do not draw from the art of the Miwuk, Paiute, Kutzadika’a, Mono, or Chukchansi nations who live in the Yosemite area), her thirteen illustrations that accompany the stories are right out of the tonalist school of Arthur Wesley Dow.
The trade edition has three known cover states, and perhaps a fourth. The most commonly seen cover is red cloth on boards with a white waterfall. Much scarcer are green cloth with a white waterfall, and green cloth with a green waterfall. There are anecdotal reports of red cloth with a red waterfall, but this has not been seen. At least two special bindings are also known: leather on boards edition with special cover artwork, and a fine leather binding by W. Root and Sons, London.
Alternate green cover of “Yosemite Legends” with white waterfall
Florence Lundborg (1871-1949) was a native of San Francisco. She studied with Arthur Mathews at the School of Design in San Francisco, and won a gold medal in the life class at the Mark Hopkins Institute. She also spent several years at the Whistler Academy in Paris (1897-1900). Lundborg was a member of Les Jeunes (“the kids”), the eclectic, bohemian group of writers and artists involved with Gelett Burgess’s magazine The Lark, for which she illustrated several covers and posters. The Lark was published by William Doxey, the bookseller for whom Elder worked before striking out on his own. Lundborg is also known for her pen-and-ink illustrations for Doxey’s edition of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
On 18 October 1904, Paul Elder, who must have been quite proud of how the book turned out, hosted a soirée in celebration of the publication of Yosemite Legends, including an exhibition of Lundborg’s original artwork for the book (see invitation below). Sadly, her plates were lost in the 1906 earthquake and fire.
Alternate green cover of “Yosemite Legends” with green waterfall. Photo courtesy of Ulrich Hacker.
Author Bertha Henry Smith (1872-1922) was a Los Angeles-based magazine and literary writer. She was born in Olathe, Kansas, the sixth of eight children of grocery and produce dealer William Piper Smith and his wife Rachel Lavinia Kay Smith, both of whom were from Pennsylvania. Bertha never married and had no children. She died of breast cancer in 1922 at the age of 50.
Many thanks to Kol Shaver of Zephyr Used & Rare Books in Vancouver, Washington for information on Bertha Smith.
Alternate cover artwork with leather on boardsSpecial leather binding of “Yosemite Legends” by W. Root and Son, LondonTitle page of “Yosemite Legends”“Yosemite Legends,” page 3Plate from “Yosemite Legends”. The woman is calling for her lost lover Koosookah“Pohono, Spirit of the Evil Wind,” from “Yosemite Legends”Invitation to the opening of Florence Lundborg’s original artwork for “Yosemite Legends,” 18 Oct 1904
