Paul Elder & Company – Page 7 – San Francisco bookseller & publisher, 1898-1968

Impression Classics

30 April 202530 November 2017 by david

Title page of "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," Elder & Shepard, 1902 — Title page of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” Elder & Shepard, 1902

Book series that gather and reprint public domain fiction have a long history. Perhaps the earliest series was Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill, founded by British publisher John Bell in 1777. Later British series included Routledge’s Railway Library (1848–99) and the Everyman’s Library (1906-). A well-known American example is the Modern Library (1925-70). Book series were a familiar sight at any turn-of-the-century bookstore.

Paul Elder published several such series. The first and largest was the Impression Classics in 1902, under the Elder & Shepard imprint. It was just one of the many items in the Elder catalog to bear the “Impression” name.

Impression Classics. A selected series of the shorter gems of literature. Beautifully printed on deckle-edged paper, with title page in two colors and etching frontispiece on Japan vellum. Bound in flexible grained lambskin with original design. Boxed. $1.25 net.

There were originally twenty-four titles in the series, numbers 1-24 on the list below. In 1904, as Paul Elder & Company, he reissued the series while adding twelve more titles, bringing the total to thirty-six.

Title page of “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” Paul Elder & Company, 1904

Selections from Marcus Aurelius, by Marcus Aurelius
Selections from Fénelon, by François Fénelon
Reflections and Moral Maxims, by François de La Rochefoucauld
Letters to His Son, by Lord Chesterfield
Friendship and Love, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Heroism and Character, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sweetness and Light, by Matthew Arnold
Virginibus Puerisque, by Robert Louis Stevenson
Poor Richard’s Almanac, by Benjamin Franklin
Wit and Wisdom of Sidney Smith, by Sydney Smith (misspelled “Sidney” on the cover and title page)
Milton, by Thomas Babington Macaulay
Sir Roger de Coverley, by Joseph Addison
Old Christmas, by Washington Irving
Rip Van Winkle and Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving
Rab and His Friends, and Marjorie Fleming, by Dr. John Brown (misspelled “Majorie” on the cover and title page)
A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
Sonnets From the Portuguese, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, by Edward Fitzgerald
Enoch Arden, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The Vision of Sir Launfal, by James Russell Lowell
Selections from Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, by Thomas Gray
The School for Scandal, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
She Stoops to Conquer, by Oliver Goldsmith
Addresses and Anecdotes, by Napoleon Bonaparte
Selections from the Prose of Honoré de Balzac, by Honoré de Balzac
Poems of Sentiment, by Lord Byron
Some Fruits of Solitude, by William Penn
Will o’ the Mill, by Robert Louis Stevenson
Men and Women, by Robert Browning
The Destruction of Pompeii, by Edward Bulwer
Golden Wings, by William Morris
Evangeline, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Selections from Epictetus, by Epictetus
The Holy Grail, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Selected Poems, by John Boyle O’Reilly

The five different cover designs and three different colors of the Impression Classics series

The title page (see photographs above) distinguishes between the 1902 and 1904 editions. As was the case with other series published by Elder, instead of printing the books at the Tomoye Press he bought the sheets elsewhere. In the case of Impression Classics, the sheets are known to come from H. M. Caldwell’s Remarque Edition of Literary Masterpieces series, first published in 1900. For example, the frontispiece and text of title #18, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, is page-for-page identical to the Remarque Rubaiyat. Only the title page and cover designs are Elder’s. While the 1902 printings read “Printed by The Stanley-Taylor Company, San Francisco” and the 1904 printings read “The Tomoyé Press, San Francisco,” those presses only provided the leaf containing the title and printer’s name, and that bearing the half-title. Caldwell’s name is not mentioned anywhere in the Elder imprints. There are at least 57 titles in the Remarque series, but Elder only purchased 36 of them.

“Poems of Sentiment” in cover designs A and E

There are five known cover designs, which I have labelled A-E (see photograph). Covers A, B, and C were almost certainly designed by Morgan Shepard, and are the only covers which have been seen on the 1902 imprints. Cover D was designed by Spencer Wright—as cited in the 1904 Catalog From a Western Publisher—strongly suggesting that Cover E is Wright’s as well. (Cover D is nearly identical to that of volumes 5 and 6 of Impressions Quarterly magazine.)

Of the copies I have examined, covers A-B have only been seen on the 1902 edition, covers D-E only on the 1904 edition, and cover C on both. But as the photo at right demonstrates, at least one copy of Poems of Sentiment, which was only issued in the 1904 edition, was issued with cover A. As a result of all this, some titles have been seen in multiple covers: for example, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard in covers C and D, and Poems of Sentiment in covers A and E. It’s unknown whether there was any reason behind why a given title appears with a given cover design.

The 1902 edition was advertised as being bound in “full flexible suede leather” and the 1904 edition in “full flexible grained lambskin,” and with two exceptions this holds for all the copies I have seen. All examined copies have top edge gilt. The bindings were also issued in three different colors: brown, green, and red. However, over the decades many green covers have faded to brown, sometimes leaving only a smudge of green on back cover or on the inside surfaces of the covers along the edge of the endpapers (note the fading in the Cover C example in the photograph above). So far, the red binding has only been seen on the 1902 edition.

The title pages are in two colors and include one of two tomoyé designs, depending on whether the title is the 1902 or 1904 printing. There is a half-title page containing the text “Impression Classics.” Many copies have endpapers containing strips of bark, something Elder used in a number of his other publications. The leather is good quality and has held up reasonably well, much better than the Panel Books, for example. The books were sold in unmarked boxes, protected by an unmarked glassine dust jacket, neither of which typically survive.

In December 2020, I was able to identify the frontispiece artist, previously known only by the signature “AD MARCEL,” as French artist Adrien Marcel. All of the frontispieces in the series are by Marcel, though not all are signed by him; of the twenty-two titles I have examined, two are unsigned.

Unadorned box and glassine dust jacket of "She Stoops to Conquer" (green cover) — Unadorned box and glassine dust jacket of “She Stoops to Conquer” (Cover B, brown)

Some of the titles include a short introduction or “prefatory remarks,” usually anonymous. The signed introductions that have been seen so far are:

Chesterfield’s Letters To His Son (#4), by “J. H. F.,” identity unknown
Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat (#18), by “M. K.” (Michael Kearney). Kearney was a Persian scholar who, in addition to the long (33 pages) introduction in the book, also translated many of Khayyam’s quatrains.
O’Reilly’s Selected Poems (#36), by William A. Hovey. Hovey (1841-1906) was a newspaper editor in Boston, and evidently a good friend of the poet.

I would like to thank Roger Paas for details about both Michael Kearney and Caldwell’s Remarque Edition series.

Close-up of the frontispiece from "Golden Wings" — Close-up of the frontispiece from “Golden Wings,” signed by Adrien Marcel at bottom left

Elizabethan Humours and the Comedy of Ben Jonson

21 July 202021 November 2017 by david

Cover of "Elizabethan Humours" — Cover of “Elizabethan Humours,” with cover artwork by Henry R. Johnson

The introduction to Elizabethan Humours and the Comedy of Ben Jonson begins:

“The Stanford English Club issues this little book in connection with, and in commemoration of, the presentation of Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour at Stanford University in March, 1905.

“This is one of a series of presentations of old English plays in the Elizabethan manner, the first of which was the revival of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, in March, 1903. The enthusiastic reception accorded this effort encouraged the English Club to preserve the Elizabethan stage built for the play, so that it might be permanently available for such presentations, and to invite Mr. Ben Greet and his company of English players to come to Stanford in the fall semesters of both 1903 and 1904. the Greet company produced, beside the old Morality play of Everyman, two Shaksperean [sic] comedies, Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing, and last of all, Hamlet–the second time in America that Shakspere’s greatest work has been produced in full and in the Elizabethan manner.”

Title page and frontispiece of "Elizabethan Humours" — Title page and frontispiece of “Elizabethan Humours”

The stage that the Stanford English Club built (see frontispiece at right) was modeled in part on the Swan Theatre as represented in a 1596 drawing reproduced in 1903’s Knight of the Burning Pestle. The stage extended directly to the “pit” where the “groundlings” (who had only paid for standing room) were gathered. The stage included a rear portion between two pillars, screened if necessary from downstage by a curtain called a “traverse,” and a upper balcony on the second floor.

After the introduction, the book contains several essays on Jonson and the Elizabethan era:

Elizabethan Humours, by Raymond Macdonald Alden (author of the Elder publication Consolatio)
Jonson’s Learned Sock, by Melville B. Anderson (1851-1933. Professor of English at Stanford University)
Upon Ben Jonson, a poem by Edmund Waller
Ben Jonson’s Prologue to Every Man in His Humour
Epilogue, written for the 1675 revival of Every Man in His Humour by Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset
Dickens and His Friends, from The Life of Charles Dickens, vol. 2, chap. 9, by John Forster, 1845 (Charles Dickens played the part of Captain Bobadil [see plate below] during an 1845 revival)
reproductions of portraits of Jonson, Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, David Garrick, and Dickens
A Satire on a “Paul’s Man”, from Virgidemiarum, Book III, Satire 7, by Joseph Hall, 1597
A Satire on Humours, from The Scourge of Villainy, Satire XI, by John Marston, 1598
Ode to Jonson, by Robert Herrick

Page 6 of "Elizabethan Humours" — Page 6 of “Elizabethan Humours”

Ben Jonson wrote Every Man in His Humour in 1598 as a “humours comedy,” in which each major character is dominated by an overriding humour or obsession. The play was probably performed for the first time by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1598 at the Curtain Theatre. Based on the playlist published in the 1616 folio of Jonson’s works, the part of Kno’well, the aged father, was almost certainly performed by William Shakespeare himself, who evidently enjoyed playing older characters.

"Bobadil," plate opposite page 6 — “Bobadil,” plate opposite page 6

Poems

3 June 20251 September 2017 by david

Paul Elder published a lot of poetry in his career: of the 414 titles on the checklist, at least sixty-one (15%) are poetry. While much of it is forgettable poetry, there are exceptions, such as Irene Hardy’s Poems (1902). It is likely a vanity publication, a limited edition of 300 printed by Charles A. Murdock; half of those were later 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 generous white space around the edges of the page.

George Hamlin Fitch, literary critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, thought Hardy’s poems were among the small amount of fine verse written in California, mentioning in particular her skill with sonnets.

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. One possibility 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”

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

Irene Hardy died in 1922. An obituary was published in The Stanford Illustrated Review:

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 after 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 [Poems] 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.¹

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

1
The Stanford Illustrated Review, Volume 23, Issue 9, June 1922, p467

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

Ruth Gordon (1933-2016)

21 July 202031 July 2016 by david

Today I mark with sadness the passing of Ruth Gordon, from whom I learned most of what I know about Paul Elder. Ruth’s 1977 Ph.D. thesis, Paul Elder: Bookseller-Publisher (1897-1917): A Bay Area Reflection, from my alma mater of UC Berkeley, was never far from my side during my initial years of research. Indeed, I can reach over and pick it up from where I sit. To my lasting regret, we met only once, in January 2004 at the opening of my Paul Elder exhibition at the San Francisco Public Library. I am indebted to Ruth, for without her work, neither that exhibition nor this very website would have ever happened. May Ruth’s memory be a blessing.

Below I have included the obituary which appeared in today’s San Francisco Chronicle.

…

Ruth I. Gordon, teacher, librarian, writer, and fierce supporter of civil liberties, died at her home in Cloverdale, California on Monday, July 18, attended by her wife Viki Marugg and dear friend Linda Perkins. Ruth was a strong advocate of library services to children in schools and in the community, and was a valued colleague and mentor to librarians throughout the United States.

Ruth was born on May 13, 1933 in Chicago, the daughter of Samuel M. and Charlotte Gordon, and the sister to Robert B. Gordon, M.D. Her family moved to Forest Hills, Queens, New York where she attended grammar school at PS 144 and graduated from Forest Hills High School.

She received her A.B. from Tufts University, her M.A. from Brown University, her Masters of Library Science from University of California, Berkeley, and her PhD from Berkeley. Her research culminated in her thesis “Paul Elder: Bookseller-Publisher (1897-1917): A Bay Area Reflection.” She was very proud of her academic success, and was forever known as Dr. Ruth.

Her teaching career spanned from the Portola Valley (California) School District to the Aviano (Italy) Dependents School (USAF). Returning to California, Ruth pursued her graduate studies at Cal while she served as a lecturer and director of practicum at the University of San Francisco. During this time, she was a National Defense Education Act scholar.

Her library career brought her to serve students in rural areas of northern California: Lassen County, Cloverdale, and Petaluma. She served as a consultant for several library projects and as the managing editor of Critical Reviewing UnLtd.

She was concerned about each child with whom she worked. She knew that reading and libraries could be a place of refuge for those whose lives were chaotic and a gateway to the wider world for those whose geography or circumstances were limited. She had high standards, both for herself and for her colleagues and supervisors and would not be silent if she felt that library services were not fully supported.

Ruth held numerous positions within the American Library Association, the Association for Library Services to Children, the Notable Children’s Books committee, the John Newbery Award Committee, and the Association of Children’s Librarians of Northern California.

Her professional work and her association work were marked by her persistent advocacy for quality services for children. She was a strong proponent of the maxim “to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable” and her comments, both at the microphone and in print reflected this drive.

Her role in bringing the bigotry within the Boy Scouts of America to the forefront of America’s social conscience through the power of the library associations was her proudest achievement in many years of activism.

As an author and editor, she enjoyed great success with poetry and prose. Many of her books are standard titles for teen readers. Ruth enjoyed a collegial relationship with Charlotte Zolotow, her editor at HarperCollins and with the legendary publicist Bill Morris.

Ruth was an active hiker and loved exploring the areas around her homes in Cloverdale and the Sea Ranch. She was often seen with her camera around her neck, as she enjoyed photography. Once a season ticket holder, Ruth was a passionate but critical fan of the Oakland Athletics. Her home garden was a delight and guests were treated to meals with produce and fruits that came from the backyard. Often, they left Cloverdale with a bag of citrus from Ruth’s trees.

Ruth was predeceased by her parents, Samuel M. and Charlotte Gordon; and by her brother, Robert B. Gordon, M.D., and her sister-in-law Lois Gordon. Ruth is survived by her beloved wife Victoria Marugg, her nieces Janet Booth, Gail Kavaler, and Robin Strawbridge and five grandnieces and grandnephews. Ruth’s memories will be a comfort to her family and a blessing to those whose lives she touched over a 60 year career. – See more at legacy.com.