Sangorski & Sutcliffe Celebrate Elizabethan Poets

by Stephen J. Gertz

Around  1920, Sangorski & Sutcliffe, the famed London bindery established in 1901 by Francis Sangorski (1875-1912) and George Sutcliffe (1875-1943), designed and bound a first edition copy of Charles Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare, published in 1808.

It's an extravagant theme binding in full teal crushed morocco with double fillet, gilt-rolled dog's tooth and dotted borders surrounding an inner band of onlaid crimson morocco with quote by vicar and poet Robert Herrick (1591-1674) in gilt with gilt tools, and a gilt-tooled frame with gilt cornerpieces enclosing a central medallion of massed gilt tools encircling an onlaid crimson morocco disc featuring stylized gilt initials, "C.L." (Charles Lamb) to the front cover. The spine is in black morocco.

The rear cover reiterates the design but with a different Herrick quote and a wreath/torch/bow & arrow motif in gilt to the central crimson disc, rather than Lamb's initials.

Deep purple morocco doublures with quote in gilt by Herrick (to upper) and lyre and laurel gilt-tooled cornerpieces highlight the inner covers, the whole framed by multiple gilt-rolled borders. Mauve silk free-endpapers with gilt-rolled border are an attractive detail. Gilt rolled and ornamented compartments, gilt ruled raised bands, and top edge gilt finish it.

The quotes by English poet, Rev. Robert Herrick, that adorn the covers and upper doublure  are pulled from his poem, Upon Master Fletcher's Incomparable Plays (1647). To upper cover band: Here's words with lines, and lines with scenes consent / To raise an Act to full astonishment. To lower cover band: Here melting numbers, words of power to move / Young men to swoon and maids to die for love. To upper doublure: To Master Fletcher / Apollo sings, his harp resounds; give room / For now behold the golden Pomp is come / Thy pomp of plays.

Elizabethan poets whose work is represented by Lamb include Thomas Sackville; Thomas Kyd; Christopher Marlowe; Thomas Decker; Ben Jonson; William Rowley; John Fletcher; Francis Beaumont; etc.

Charles Lamb was born in London in 1775. He studied at Christ's Hospital where he met and formed a lifelong friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. When he was twenty years old he endured a bout of insanity and was confined to an asylum. The next year, 1796, his sister, Mary Ann, murdered their mother and was declared a "lunatic." She, too, was confined to an asylum but was eventually discharged into the care of her brother. Charles became friends with a group of young writers who supported political reform, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Hazlitt, Henry Brougham, Lord Byron, Thomas Barnes and Leigh Hunt.

In 1796 Lamb contributed four sonnets to Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects (1796). This was followed by Blank Verse (1798) and Pride's Cure (1802). He worked for the East India Company in London but moonlighted as a contributor to several journals and newspapers including London Magazine, The Morning Chronicle, Morning Post and the The Quarterly Review. He is best known for his pseudonymous essays for London Magazine, collected and published as Essays of Elia (1823), and for Tales From Shakespeare (1807), a wildly successful collaboration with his sister. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare went a long way to re-introducing and popularizing Shakespeare's contemporaries. He died in 1834. 

Stamp-signed to lower doublure.
S&S were proud of this binding;
it is rare to find "Designed and bound"
in their signature. "Bound by" is the usual.

Robert Herrick was a 17th century poet of the tempus fugit-carpe diem school who wrote at least one poem that has earned enduring fame in English literature, with an immortal first line known to everyone even if they don't know the poem or poet.

TO THE VIRGINS, TO MAKE MUCH OF TIME

by Robert Herrick

GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may,
    Old time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
    To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
    The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
    And nearer he's to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
    When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
    Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
    And while ye may go marry:
For having lost but once your prime
    You may for ever tarry.

__________

[SANGORSKI & SUTCLIFFE, binders]. LAMB, Charles. Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare. With Notes. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808.

First edition. Octavo (7 1/8 x 4 1/4 in; 181 x 108 mm). xii, 484 pp.

__________

Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
__________
__________

Marlon Brando Plays Mister Roberts, With Annotations And Bookplate

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1955, while Henry Fonda prepared to reprise his role as Mister Roberts, the title character in director John Ford's film adaptation of Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan's 1948 hit Broadway show that starred Fonda, Marlon Brando was also studying to play the part.

"Unknown to Fonda, Warners had thought William Holden or Marlon Brando would be better box-office and had consented to Fonda only when Ford threatened not to make the movie unless they did so" (Gallagher, Tag. John Ford: The Man and His Films).

Brando's working copy of the published play, complete with his hand-written annotations and bookplate, zipped in and out of the marketplace last week  and a collector, wallet now $2750 lighter, is very pleased to possess this gem.

On the front free-endpaper Brando wrote: 

"the focus should perhaps be that he wants to get off the can and away from the captain rather than persue [sic] the fulfillment of a neurotic compulsion to do his share. He seems to be driven, by some kind of guilt feeling, into his frantic effort to get into the bullets."

On the front paste-down, Brando notes that on page 45 Mister Roberts "confirms his irrationality on the subject and makes him [?] ambitious, compulsive and and [sic] not derived from a source of time, nobility of character or refinement of moral principle."

 

Brando's Method acting process is evident as he dissects Mister Roberts to get inside the character's head and determine his motivation. Brando also circled the character's (his) lines in the play, and his inked marginalia is found throughout.

Let us now pause to get them colored lights goin' and contemplate the preposterous notion of Marlon Brando portraying Lt. Doug Roberts, a college-educated naval officer who has earned the love and respect of his crew while engaging in a personal war with the U.S.S. Reluctant's commanding officer, Lt. Comd. Morton, the crew's nemesis and Roberts' bête noire. Casting, thy name is catastrophe.

Brando would have required a broom up his butt to portray the firmly centered, of inner strength, quietly commanding Roberts that Fonda so wholly yet lightly embodied and had won a Tony award for his Broadway performance. It helped that Fonda had been a Navy officer aboard ship during WWII. Brando could have captured the character's heft but not his casual, understated and contained force. That was Henry Fonda's hat-trick as an actor. It was not Marlon Brando's, whose vulnerabilities were visible as klieg lights on stage and screen. You sensed Fonda's inner frailties, you saw Brando's on a billboard. For instance:

James Cagney (as Capt. Morton): No. You're a smart boy, Roberts. But I know how to take care of smart boys. I hate your guts, you smart college guys! I've been seeing your kind around since I was ten years old... working as a busboy. "Oh busboy, it seems my friend has thrown up on the table. Clean up that mess, boy, will'ya?" And then when I went to sea as a steward... people poking at you with umbrellas. "Oh, boy!", "You, boy!", "Careful with that luggage, boy!" And I took it. I took it for years! But I don't have to take it any more. There's a war on, and I'm captain of this vessel, and now YOU can take it for a change! The worst thing I can do to you... is to keep you right here, Mister, and here is where you're going to stay. Now, GET OUT!

Marlon Brando as Mr. Roberts: Stella!!

James Cagney as Capt. Morton: [on the loudspeaker in reference to his "missing" palm tree... ] All right! Who did it? Who did it? You are going to stand sweating at those battle stations until someone confesses! It's an insult to the honor of this ship! The symbol of our cargo record has been destroyed and I'm going to find out who did it if it takes all night!

Brando as Mister Roberts: How 'bout cuttin' the re-bop? Be comfortable. That's my motto up where I come from. Well, I guess I'm gonna strike you as being the unrefined type, huh? A Yale man, not Harvard. I coulda been a contender instead of a bum  on a cargo ship, which is what I am. It was you, Capt. Morton, it was you...

Thank God John Ford made Warner Brothers an offer they couldn't refuse.

Marlon Brando as Mister Roberts:
How did you get in the Navy?
How did you get on our side? Oh you ignorant, arrogant,
ambitious... keeping sixty-two men in prison 'cause you
got a palm tree for the work they did. I don't know which
I hate worse, you or that other malignant growth that
stands outside the door"

A wonderful provenance for this book: from the collection of Brando's '60s lover and later employee, L.A. actress and screenwriter, Pat Quinn, who starred as Alice in Alice's Restaurant (1969).

Brando material with annotations related to acting rarely finds its way into the marketplace; it is scarce, kept, coveted, and only deaccessioned with great reluctance.
__________

[BRANDO, Marlon]. HEGGEN, Thomas and Joshua Logan. Mister Roberts. New York: Random House, 1948. First edition.  Octavo. 162 pp. Illustrations. Blue cloth. The copy of Marlon Brando, with his notes.

__________

Images courtesy of Royal Books, with our thanks.
__________
__________

The Beautiful Trade Bindings Of Ibsen First Editions

By Stephen J. Gertz

IBSEN, Henrik. Hedda Gabler.
Kobenhavn: Gyyldendalske Boghandels Forlag, 1890.

Considered to be amongst the most important plays and Henrik Ibsen the most influential playwright since Shakespeare, the first editions of Ibsen's dramas in the original Norwegian, were bound by the publisher in splendid cloth trade bindings with, ultimately, a uniform design in varying colors.

IBSEN, Henrik. Nar Vi Dode Vagner (When We Dead Awaken).
Kobenhavn: Gyyldendalske Boghandels Forlag, 1899.

"More than anyone, he gave theatrical art a new vitality by bringing into European bourgeois drama an ethical gravity, a psychological depth, and a social significance which the theater had lacked since the days of Shakespeare. In this manner, Ibsen strongly contributed to giving European drama a vitality and artistic quality comparable to the ancient Greek tragedies" (Bjorn Hemmer, University of Oslo).

IBSEN, Henrik. John Gabriel Borkman.
Kobenhavn: Gyyldendalske Boghandels Forlag, 1892.

Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag, of Copenhagen, was founded in 1770 by Søren Gyldendal. It is the oldest and largest publishing house in Denmark, and, prior to 1925, it was also the leading publishing house in Norway,  publishing all of Henrik Ibsen's works under arrangement with his counselor  and friend, publisher Frederik Hegel, who, in 1850, had assumed control of Gldendal and for twenty-two years published Ibsen's work until his death in 1889, at which point his son, Jacob, assumed the responsibility and honor.

IBSEN, Henrik. Et Dukkenhjem (A Doll's House).
Kobenhavn: Gyyldendalske Boghandels Forlag, 1879.

Brand, released in 1866, was Ibsen's breakthrough and the first of Ibsen's works to be published by Frederik Hegel, who had his doubts. Only 1275 copies were printed. But the book went through at least three more printings by the end of the year. Ibsen's reputation was made, and he was recognized as the greatest of all Scandinavian writers.

From that point on his books were issued in first printings of 8,000-10,000 copies in attractive cloth trade bindings whose style evolved into the uniform design seen here.

IBSEN. Henrik. Bygmester Solness (The Master Builder).
Kobenhavn: Gyyldendalske Boghandels Forlag, 1896.

These first editions in their attractive trade bindings were, however, expensive for the average individual, and so Jacob Hegel, in 1898, suggested to Ibsen that they reissue all of his works in inexpensive editions.

"It gave me great pleasure to receive your proposal for the publication of a low-priced popular edition of my books," Ibsen replied to Hegel. "For a considerable time I had been wishing for such an event in order to make it possible for my collected works to be distributed among social strata to which it is difficult for the more expensive editions to gain entry. And now the moment is undoubtedly the most favourable that could be chosen. It is therefore with great satisfaction and gratitude that I have received your excellent offer and I consequently consider the matter decided in respect thereof" (Letter to Hegel, January 16, 1898).

IBSEN, Henrik. Vildanden (The Wild Duck).
Kobenhavn: Gyyldendalske Boghandels Forlag, 1884.

When John  Carter and Percy H. Muir organized Printing and the Mind of Man, the classic 1963 exhibition with its now standard and indispensable reference catalog (1967), on the impact of 424 books on five centuries of Western civilization, they included the works of Henrik Ibsen.

"Choosing one of his plays above all others was difficult. It is virtually impossible to select any one play as 'typical' of Ibsen's outlook....to choose between his attacks on social corruption...and his critical studies of the subjection of women, such as A Doll's House (1879) or The Wild Duck (1887) is not easy. Hedda Gabler has been selected here as possibly his most frequently performed play in the modern theater.

Publisher's blindstamp to rear boards, as called for.

"Ibsen's influence on the whole course of modern drama may be indicated by the inclusion of his plays in the repertoire of every avant-garde theater of his day... Ibsen's revolutionary technique has now become firmly established... As to the social message of his plays, it should be remembered that his purpose was analytic not didactic. He was concerned with the exploration of social problems rather than with moral preaching" (Printing and the Mind of Man 375).

__________
__________

Richard M. Nixon, Thespian Interpreter Of Ayn Rand

By Stephen J. Gertz

Ronald Reagan was not the only President of the United States who was an actor before entering politics.

On the evening of October 20, 1938, Richard M. Nixon, a year after being admitted to the  bar  and thirty years prior to his election as POTUS, trod the boards as District Attorney Flint for the first of a two night run of the Whittier Community Players' production, staged at the Whittier Woman's Club House, of Night of January 16th, Ayn Rand's courtroom drama,  her first play and a hit on Broadway during the 1935-36 season.

This was the amateur Master Thespian's first bite at potential stage stardom. Later in the year, he co-starred with Thelma "Pat" Ryan as the leads in the Whittier Community Players' production of George S. Kaufman and Alexander Woolcott's mystery-melodrama, The Dark Tower. Following the standard script, the two actors fell in love.

On this night (October 20, not January 16th), however, Nixon limned the role that he would wear as a political mantle, that of a D.A. whose traditional values drive him to prosecute the alluring, independent, atheistic flouter of social standards, Karen Andre (Rand's stand-in), for murder as much for her offense to the social order as her guilt.

The spokesman for the future Silent Majority found his voice in the character, his acting experience preparing him for the second of his six crises (the first as snake pursuing Alger Hiss), his 1952 role as  Vice-Presidential Candidate up against the wall to face dastardly charges of corruption. It was a heart-rending portrayal capped by the schmaltz-shmeared Shakespearean  monologue known as "the Checkers speech" in which he wept havoc and let slip the pooch of war to vanquish his enemies, succeeded, and definitively proved that in politics a honey-baked ham can make it to the big time. In politics, as well as strip-tease, you gotta have a gimmick.

And in dramaturgy, too. Rand's contrivance in Night of January 16th was to have the play's jury chosen from each performance's audience and let them decide the play's ending, "guilty" or "not guilty." Further, Rand left the ultimate truths ambiguous, leaving it up to the actors to decide whether their characters were lying or being honest. - another nod to politicians who often don't know whether they're  honestly lying, lying about being honest, are actually honest, or honestly don't know the difference.

The reviews for this production of Rand's Night of the 16th are lost to history; we don't know whether Nixon laid an egg or, as Ruby Keeler in 42d Street, went out a youngster and came back a star.

"Nixon, you're going out a youngster but you've got to come back a star!"

"Now, take off the dress and lose the hat. You look ridiculous."

Whatever the critics may have thought the footlights agreed with him. 

"One day in 1938, Mrs. Lilly Baldwin, the director of the local amateur theatre group, telephoned me to ask if I would like to play the part of a prosecuting attorney in their upcoming production of Ayn Rand’s courtroom drama, The Night of January 16th. I took the part and thoroughly enjoyed this experience in amateur dramatics" (RN, interview cited by Nixon Foundation).

This choice little piece of ephemera is being offered by Between the Covers as "The PERFECT gift for conservative objectivists." Liberal subjectivists may conscientiously object; it's the perfect gift for the Leftie in your life who needs a good laugh.

We leave you with Our Man Flint's bravura turn as Man On The Ropes; afterward, he was in like Flynn, without the sexual connotation, of course.

__________

[NIXON, Richard M.]. [RAND, Ayn]. Whittier Comunity Players Present "Night of January 16th" by Ayn Rand. Woman's Club House, October 20 and 21, 1938. Seventeenth Season, First Production. Whittier [California]: Whittier Community Players, 1938. Program for the play.

__________

Program images courtesy of Between The Covers, with our thanks.
__________
__________

Unpublished Significant Early Tennessee Williams Poem Surfaces

by Stephen J. Gertz

Between the end of May and the beginning of September 1937, Tennessee Williams, 26 years old and a student at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote a startling prose poem, one never published and completely unknown to Williams scholars.

The piece, titled The Body Awaits, a monologue spoken by a bum in a St. Louis flophouse, appears to be related to Williams' fourth apprentice play, Fugitive Kind, also written in 1937 and occurring in a flophouse. It is unclear whether the piece was working preparation for Fugitive Kind, or, alternatively, grew out of it, Williams sensing something that he wanted to develop independently from the play.

The work is eerily prescient of his sad, later years. It begins:

I am tired. I am tired of speech and action. If you should meet me upon the street and still know me in spite of my present condition I would prefer that you passed me without salutation. Your face is unknown to me now. I do not remember your name. Maybe we drank together once or shared grub in a jungle of flop-house somehwehre [sic] in a different state or different city but that was a long time ago.

And ends, in this draft:

Death is the last convenience. Perhaps it will be a truck skidding close to a corner on which I stand. Accident or on purpose? Who cares! A step or two forwards or backwards and the whole thing's done. The body awaits identification at the city morgue. Will you perform a post-mortem? In the heart of me you will find a tiny handful of dust. Take it and blow it out upon the wind. Let the wind have it and it will find its way home.

In corrected typescripts of two different versions of Williams's working drafts, the earlier is typed on both sides of a single sheet, double and single-spaced in blocks of text on the first side, with several versions of some lines; on the reverse a portion is  double-spaced, with a line by line layout.

These two drafts contain about twenty-five words in Williams's hand in pencil.

The later version is double-spaced on four pages (including two drafts of the second page), and has thirty-four words and other corrections in pencil, by Williams. It's signed in type and dated June, 1937.

Thomas A. Goldwasser, of Goldwasser Rare Books, currently offering the typescript, said,  "It is particularly interesting to see the budding playwright experimenting with voices and phrases and trying to expand his imaginative world."

Williams typescript/manuscript material is extremely difficult to acquire. "Almost all such Williams  material is held by institutions, and rarely appears for sale," Goldwasser notes.

Here we have, pre-Tennessee, Thomas Lanier Williams III, unhappy in childhood, depressed in adolescence, and only two years after a nervous breakdown, contemplating, in his mid-twenties, a void in the heart, exhaustion with life, a turning within and away from the world, and an acceptance if not welcome of death.

It ends with what would become Williams signature language, a soft, stylized tongue never heard in real life, the song of a splendid bird with broken wing who sought compassion for all the injured and sung with a voice desperately seeking lyric poetry in a brutal prose world. In the beginning he saw his end with a yearning to return to the refinement that he never knew as a child yet mourned just the same, the Never-Neverland of a tortured Peter Pan from Mississippi who sought grace in all things but experienced its subversion by gross reality.  Tennessee Williams was Blanche DuBois. In The Body Awaits, Blanche lies with her brothers, the lost, helpless souls wounded beyond salvation.

"In the heart of me you will find a tiny handful of dust. Take it and blow it out upon the wind. Let the wind have it and it will find its way home."

The body awaits delivery to where the mind has already arrived, to that supernal place where nightmares subside, dreams are never disturbed, and the kindness of strangers is no stranger.
__________

Image courtesy of Thomas A. Goldwasser Rare Books, with our thanks.
__________
__________

An Illustrious Anonymous Author Unmasked

by Stephen J. Gertz

Preview

Anonymous is a perennially busy writer, with a list of books that could span the Equator with enough left over to tie a  sash knot with long tassels. Anonymous writers toil, of course, in anonymity, a sere environment sorely lacking in amity; it's a lonely place. Some authors prefer to write anonymously to protect their reputation in another genre of literature, or because their subject matter is too delicate to risk open attribution.

At this point you may be asking yourself, How can an author be illustrious and anonymous at the same time? I hadn't a clue, so I asked the Rare Book Guy (the Carnac the Magnificent of rare bookmen, Shell's Answer Man to the antiquarian book set), for insight. He held the question, inside an envelope formerly secured within a mayonnaise jar, to his forehead and, after communing with the occult, revealed the answer:

"In a sea of anonymity how can one anonymous author be distinguished from another anonymous author? By gilding the anonymous lily! After all, there's Anonymous and then there's ANONYMOUS. Thus, Anonymous becomes 'Illustrious Anonymous,' 'Best-Selling Anonymous,' 'Critically Acclaimed Anonymous,' etc. That way, the potential reader knows that this Anonymous ain't just another Anonymous from the neighborhood, and the publisher can sleep soundly knowing that sleight-of-hand  will tempt the gullible; Anonymous as sales ploy."

All well and good, RBG, but what about an author so obscure, so beyond recognition that when they look in the mirror even they don't know who they are? Why should a publisher risk money on a complete unknown when Anonymous has such a great track record? Pamela was anonymously published in its first edition of 1740 (dated 1741) and it did wonders for Samuel Richardson's career.

And so I imagine that, faced with Dark Masquerade - a potboiler about a "prominent criminal attorney, well versed in the art of fixing juries," who falls for a debutante that "daring young news photographer" Jimmy Cronin also has eyes for but when Butch and Larry McCabe, fraternal gangsters and disgruntled clients of our prominent criminal attorney, threaten the love triangle, and "an avalanche of masterfully portrayed incidents including a jail-break and the appearance of a mysterious nun on an ocean voyage" ensues - the editor and publisher of New York's Green Circle Books had to make an important decision.

(Your attention has likely been arrested by the sudden appearance of a seafaring nun of mystery and intrigue, and, presumably, a great set of sea-legs. Angel of Death or Angie Dickinson in bride of Christ drag? Or, a character out of Pirandello who accidentally walked into this plot in search of an author named Anonymous but, because the author  was anonymous and not in the phone book, she tramped the earth and sailed the seas an eternal vagabond).

Editor: It's a smash but for a story like this "by Mrs. H. H. Harris and Edward Doherty" doesn't grab. Too polite.

Publisher: Tell me about it. Who are they? Sound like high society yokels to me. "Mrs. H.H. Harris and Mr. Edward Doherty Are Pleased To Announce the Publication of Their New Novel. Tea and Scones Will Be Served Afterward at the Waldorf." I'm thinking pseudonym.

Editor: Whad'ya have in mind?

Publisher: Something punchy, urban, sharp, gritty. "Brick Wall." "Lance Boil." "Duke Street." "Dick Gunn." "Cotton Gin." No, forget "Cotton Gin." Too rural for this caper.

Editor: How 'bout, "Anonymous." 

Publisher: It's been done. 

Editor: I've got it. "Illustrious Anonymous!" 

Publisher: Hmmm. Mystery, prestige, strange oxymoron. It's magic! Could be Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dreiser, the man in the moon! This is why I pay you the big bucks.

And so Mrs. H.H. Harris and Edward Doherty became the "Illustrious Anonymous Author" of Dark Masquerade.

Half of "Illustrious Anonymous Author" actually was somewhat illustrious.

Edward "Eddie" J.  Doherty (1890-1975) was a journalist ("The Star Reporter of America"), novelist (The Broadway Murders: A Night Club Mystery, NY: New York Crime Club/Doubleday, 1929),  and Hollywood writer best known for his screenplay, The Sullivans, which was nominated for 1944's Best Original Story Oscar™Academy Award. A Catholic, he became an ordained priest at age seventy-eight. It is unknown whether a mysterious nun on an ocean voyage was his muse.

Eddie Doherty.

My guess is that he - "a competitive professional, passionate lover, cosmopolitan traveller, enjoyer of the good things in life [who] left the Church in fury and pain but returned later in tears of joy" (Madonna House blurb for his autobiography) - was the pro that helped amateur Mrs. H.H. Harris write Dark Masquerade.

Virginia Stallard Harris was the wife of successful Fifth Avenue perfumer and Broadway investor, Herbert H. Harris (1898-1949), whose main claim to theater fame was that Arthur Miller's All My Sons (1947) was "Produced in Association With Herbert H. Harris," i.e. he was the play's financial angel. Dark Masquerade was, apparently, Mrs. Harris' one and only writing credit; I've found no records for her under her name or in variations. She is, however, to the best of my research, the only writer in the English language to ever be formally credited as "An Illustrious Anonymous Author," and so enters literary history as an illustrious anonymous footnote.

• • •

Apologies to the scions of Mrs. H.H. Harris, and Edward Doherty for ripping the veil of anonymity off their illustriously anonymous ancestors. It was a job no one cared about and didn't need to be done. As such, I'm a sap, gulled by the publisher's baloney. It's another bent feather in Booktryst's cap, in cahoots with the U.S. Catalog of Copyright Entries.

A few more words on Eddie Doherty, a very interesting character.

According to his New York Times obit (May 5, 1975), which described him as  "the star reporter straight out of the raffish, fast-talking 'Front Page' set that thrived on scandal...a chronicler of the Jazz Age," the Chicago Mirror declared him "America's Highest Paid Reporter." He earned his reputation as "an ace general assignment reporter" with his coverage of  Hollywood's Wallace Reid and Fatty Arbuckle scandals for the Chicago Tribune. He later moved to New York to join the staff of Liberty magazine. It is during this period that he likely collaborated with Mrs. Harris.  I suspect that Mr. Harris may have invested in his wife's ambition by hiring Doherty for the project.

The Times obit quotes one of his former editors: "'When he's good, he's very, very good. When he's bad, he's lousy.'"

He had studied for the priesthood but the death of his first wife in the flu epidemic of 1918 estranged him from the Church and God. He became a reporter. He ran wild. When his second wife died, c. 1939, he returned to the Roman Catholic faith.

At the time he became a Catholic priest he was married. He was ordained in Israel as a member of the Melkites, a Byzantine order (not tied to the Eastern Church) that recognizes the Pope in Rome as its sovereign but allows married men into the priesthood.

__________

[HARRIS, Mrs. H.H. and Edward Doherty]. An Illustrious Anonymous Author. Dark Masquerade. New York: Green Circle Books, 1936. First (only) edition. Octavo. 312 pages. Cloth, with dust jacket.

I've found little about Green Circle Books beyond that it was, apparently, an imprint of  former Macaulay executive and New York publisher, Lee Furman, who filed the copyright for Dark Masquerade on August 11, 1936. OCLC notes records for titles published by Green Circle 1936-1937, at which point it seems that the imprint dropped off Earth.

__________

Dark Masquerade image courtesy of ReadInk, currently offering this volume, with our thanks. Image of Eddie Doherty courtesy of Madonna House.

__________

__________

Hamlet! Oh Hamlet! Whence Thy Tragic Tale Begotten?

The original source for Hamlet is as celebrated as the Prince of Denmark's indecision.

by Stephen J. Gertz

 

Stop me if this sounds familiar:

A king is murdered by his brother, who marries the widow and succeeds to the throne. The son of the murdered king feigns madness, whereupon he is suspected and tried, first by entangling him in the love of a maiden, and second by an interview with his mother during which he discovers and kills a spy. The king sends him to Britain with two attendants. He returns to Denmark, he slays the king.

It’s the story of Amleth, a saga first set down by Danish national historian Saxo Grammaticus (Saxo the Learned) in books three and four in his sixteen-book Danish History (aka Gesta Danorum - Deeds of the Danes) between 1185 - 1215, first printed in 1514 and reprinted twenty years later in the edition under notice. Sixty-six years after that, the story was adapted for the stage, and the rest is Hamlet, Shakespeare’s great tragedy, which introduced to the world one of the most complex and celebrated characters in all literature, and posed the essential human existential question in a simple declaration that has yet to be improved upon.

But first, back-o to Saxo, a common name in medieval Denmark. He was born in Zealand c. 1150. Well-educated, he was secretary-clerk to Absalon, Archbishop of Lund, foremost advisor to Valdemar I, King of Denmark, during a particularly turbulent period in its history. The first writer of any note to emerge from that Scandinavian land, “Saxo was to Denmark what Geoffrey of Monmouth was to Britain. He drew on Latin histories such as Bede and Adam of Bremen, on Icelandic and Danish manuscripts and on oral traditions” (Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare). His Danish History was the most ambitious literary undertaking of medieval Denmark and remains the essential source for the nation's distant past.

This edition of Saxo is blessed with a first leaf of text printed within elaborate historiated borders, the horizontal by Hans Holbein the Younger, the vertical border by Jakob Faber, aka Master I.F. (his block signature).

And what of Amleth, Prince of Denmark, who crossed all borders to inspire world literature?

“The Amleth saga belongs to a common type of revenge story in which the hero feigns insanity or stupidity to save his life and gain an opportunity for a coup” (Bullough). By the time Shakespeare got around to adapting the work, “at some stage, the saga, already somewhat modernized by Belleforest, was brought into line with Renaissance manners and current tales of court-murders and revenge. This involved changing the ending by having Hamlet achieve his vengeance during a fencing match. It also meant altering the way in which Old Hamlet was killed, and the Ghost’s part was made important by substituting the Italianate secret way of poison for open murder at a banquet...Neither in Saxo or Belleforest did the wicked uncle show any sign of remorse, and the introduction of the prayer scene indicates that the play had religious implications not present in the old saga” (ibid.).

Beyond its content and artful borders this edition is noteworthy for possessing a five-line commendation by Erasmus; whether solicited by the publisher or taken from Erasmus' correspondence remains unclear. What is clear, however, is that by this note Erasmus enters the hall of early blurb fame:

"In Danium navigare malo, quae nobis dedit Saxonem Grammaticum, qui suae gentis historiam splendide magnificeque contexuit. Probo vividum ardens ingenium..."

A few words jump off the page and you don't need to know Latin to get a sense that Erasmus is over the moon about the book. "If you wish to navigate Denmark, seek what is known and surrender to Saxo Grammaticus, and his unique, splendid and magnificent historical construction. It demonstrates vivid, glowing natural character."

But for a few surviving fragments, the original manuscripts of Danorum Historiae are lost. Printed editions are all that remain, and this, save for the first printed edition of 1514, is the earliest. It is certainly the most beautiful, a typographical joy.

__________

SAXO GRAMMATICUS. [ERASMUS]. Danorum historiae libri XVI: trecentis abhinc annis conscripti, tanta dictionis elegantia, rerumque gestarum varietate, ut cum omni vetustate contendere optimo videri possint... Des. Erasmi Roterodami de Saxone censura... Basileae: Apud Io. Bebelium, 1534. Second edition. Folio. [126], 189, [1, blank] pp. Roman letter, ruled in red throughout, printer’s device on title and verso to last leaf. First leaf with an elaborate border of metal-cut ornament, the horizontal borders by Hans Holbein the Younger, the vertical borders by the Jacob Faber aka Master I.F.

__________

Images courtesy of Bernard Quaritch Ltd, with our thanks, and a tip o' the hat to their cataloger. Collectors may inquire here.

__________

With apologies for the rough and mangled English translation of Ersamus.

_________

_________

Down With Wall Street! (1920 version)

Ninety years ago anti-Wall St. sentiment exploded.
 
by Stephen J. Gertz

"Direct Action." New York: 1920.
Broadsheet (28 x 22 cm)
On newsprint, recto-only.

At 12:01PM on September 16, 1920 a massive blast outside the headquarters of J.P. Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street, the Financial District's busiest corner, left thirty-eight people dead and 143 seriously wounded.

It was the deadliest bombing on U.S. soil to date. The Washington Post declared it "an act of war."

Just prior to the explosion flyers were found by a Post Office letter-carrier in the District. Printed in red ink on white paper, the text read: "Remember, we will not tolerate any longer. Free the political prisoners, or it will be sure death for all of you." It was signed "American Anarchist Fighters."

The case dragged on for over three years yet no indictments were ever issued. The I.W.W., the Communist Party, the Union of Russian Workers - the usual suspects - were investigated and cleared.

Curiously and quite coincidentally, dramatist Booth Tarkington wrote a play, in four acts addressing the radicalism of the times, that opened exactly one week before the bombing, on September 9th.

"Written as a light satiric comedy, Booth Tarkington's Poldekin (1920)...was intended to laugh Communism out of existence. A comic rendering, he offers, was 'more effective than to fall into a fury at mention of the word, as so many Americans are doing.' The title character...leads a group of Russian revolutionaries, who, seeing themselves as sociopolitical missionaries, intend to launch a rebellion in the United States by publishing propaganda and inspiring a class war. Referring to postwar upheaval, a professor among them intones: 'We take advantage of the violent mood to produce universal war between the classes'" (Wainscott, The Emergence of the Modern American Theater, 1914-1929, p. 172).

The play, which only ran for one month,  inspired the anonymous author of this broadside, published without imprint or any identifying information whatsoever. All we know is that is was issued between September 16  and sometime in October 1920, when the curtain rose for the last time; Poldekin closed after only forty-four performances. Though a  light satire it was, apparently, too heavy for theater goers prior to the bombing and afterward, when nerves were frazzled and fear was dominant.

(Famed stage, later film, actor George Arliss played the title role. Twenty-seven year old Edward G. Robinson portrayed Pinsky. Sidney Toler, who later starred in the Charlie Chan movies -  assuming the role after Warner Oland's death - acted the character, Welch).

Wall Street, September 16, 1920.
Photo credit: World-Telegram

This broadside is one of the many items concerning Social Movements that rare book dealer, Lorne Bair, features in his most recent catalog, Catalog Ten: Fall 2010. 

MARLEN, George (pseud. of George Spiro).
Earl Browder: Communist or Tool of Wall Street -
Stalin, Trotsky or Lenin?
New York: By the author, 1937.

"Our mission," Bair writes, "is to seek out unusual and obscure material relating to (mostly) American social movements and to approach it with the respect and scholarship it has long deserved but only rarely received from collectors and booksellers.

The Pink Iconoclast. No. 49 (Nov. 14, 1903).
Colorado Springs, CO: E.E. Sonnanstine.
Quirky, scarce newspaper devoted to
freethought and radical politics.

"Though our sympathies lie decidedly on the Left, we feel a responsibility to document as much of American social history as we can stomach...So in this catalog you'll find George Lincoln Rockwell butting up against Big Bill Haywood, and primitive racist lost-race fantasies rubbing elbows with civil rights manifestos.

"SLEUTH" (pseud. of S.O. Berg?)
Capitalism's Last Struggle: Fascist Terrorism
Just Around the Corner. Manifesto of the
United Workers and Farmers. Revised
from Prosperity Around the Corner.
Seffner, FL: S.O. Berg, [c. 1934].
A fictional parable of Depression-era class warfare.

"Don't let this bug you. Or, rather, go ahead, let it bug you; get worked up: that's what nearly every item in this catalog was intended to make you do. 

WHITE, Bishop Alma.
Heroes of the Fiery Cross.
Illustrated by Rev. Branford Clarke.
Zarephath, NJ: The Good Citizen, 1928.
Racist, and anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic
encomium to the Klu Klux Klan.
Published in New Jersey.

"It's strange times we live in, and we could do worse than to remember that even stranger times preceded us." 

For example: KKK activity in New Jersey.

ADAMS, Samuel Hopkins. The Flagrant Years:
A Novel of the Beauty Market.New York: Horace Liveright, 1929.

The beauty business had, by the time  The Flagrant Years was published in 1929, evolved into the the beauty industry, and the beautification of the average American woman became a social revolution that triumphed over all religious and moral objections. It was, in its way, as radical as any contemporary political movement. Case in point: the  Marcel Wave.

Lorne Bair Rare Books logo.
Based upon that of The Vanguard Press,
the venerable radical publishing house.

The culprits to the Wall Street bombing of 1920 were never apprehended. It had been suspected that  sympathizers to Luigi Galleani, the Italian anarchist active in the United States until his deportation in 1919, were to blame. It appears that Galleanist Mario Buda was behind the attack; never questioned in the bombing's aftermath, he skipped to Naples, never to return to the U.S.

And Booth Tarkington's Poldekin has, to the best of my investigation, never been published, separately or within an anthology. As playwright, director, humorist, and drama critic George S. Kaufman famously declared, "Satire is what closes on Saturday night." But when the satire concerns radical politics it closes on Friday night and theatricals publisher Samuel French wants nothing to do with it.

___________

All images courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books, with our thanks.

A special thank you to Peacay at BibliOdyssey for a key assist.

___________

If you enjoyed this post, you will also enjoy:

Sacco & Vanzetti: Jazz Age Terrorists?

__________

__________