"Wives Is What I Hanker For": Mormons Take Center Stage

by Stephen J. Gertz

We shift from rare prose literature to rare literature of the theater today, inspired by an item offered in Swann Galleries upcoming Vintage  Posters sale, August 7, 2013.

During the 1880-1881 theatrical touring season the Goesche-Hopper Company presented 100 Wives, an anti-Mormon tabloid-theater comedy-melodrama with a dash of anti-Chinese racism that appears to have sold out every performance in every town and city it played in.

The playbill set forth the proceedings:

EMBLEMATIC TABLEAU - Inner Temple of the Mormons. The Danites Receiving a New Covenant. The Solemn Oaths of the Blood atonement. The Chant of the Priests. Immediately following this picture, which illustrates the mission of the Destroying Angels, the curtain rises upon the Play.

ACT I - Salt Lake City. Arrival of the English Colony at New Jerusalem. Elder Bezum's Wicked Designs. The McGinley Family. Elsie Bradford Hears Terrible News. A Timely Rescue.

ACT II - Nick's Ranch at McGinely's Gulch. The Chinese Question. A Boys Celebrate. A Lost Child. The Danites in Pursuit. Bezum Baffled. The Dead Restored To Life.

ACT III - TABLEAU I - McGinley's Home. Reconciliation and New Terrors. Mrs. McGinley's Plan. "Wives is what I hanker for." TABLEAU 2 - Up among the Mines. Little Bessie Prays for her Papa. The Death Fall from the Cliff.

ACT IV - Exterior of the Mormon Tabernacle. The Marriage. Elder Bezum presses Hard. The Mormon Church is Supreme. Surprise. The Govermnet has Something to Say at Last. "Home Sweet Home."

First on the bill, the play's lead character possesses my new favorite name, one right out of S.J. Perelman. Elder Bezum, third on the bill, is the zealous Mormon who declaims, "Wives is what I hanker for." A better headline for a personal ad  would be difficult to compose, "SWMM Seeks Wives! Wives, Wives!" lacking its quaint colloquial fervor.

The Cast:

Confucius McGinley, a Doubtful Convert.
Edward Branford, a Gentile.
Elder Bezum, A Pillar of the Church.
Hung Li, a Celestial.
Mrs. Sophronia McGinley, an Ambitious Woman.
Elsie Bradford, a Deceived Woman.
Mrs. Andrews, a Deluded Woman.
Little Bessie

"If this play could run for a hundred nights instead of closing this week, it would still not exhaust popular interest, for every one who has once seen it must want to go again. It has taken the town by surprise, and that, too, in the midst of election excitement; such a fresh and dramatic story, based on a matter that all are familiar with, yet that for the first time seems to come home to the audience with all its tragic capabilities.

"The popular idea of the 'American play,' with its slang and localisms of manners and dress, is very far indeed from all that is presentd in 'The Hundred Wives.' Nor need any one fear to be introduced into the American harem at Salt Lake, or be treated to any moralizing sermons or situations, in themselves demoralizing and disgusting. On the contrary the plot of this Mormon story is worked out with a hand at once delicate and skilful.

"The believer and the Danite, Mormon Apostle and Destroying Angel, are given just that touch of fanatic devotion and of quaint phraseology as brings out the livery this creed has adopted to serve the devil in, and the opening tableau of the Danite vow in the Mormon Tabernacle is the real keynote to the story. The skill, too, with which the Chinaman is made to foil a Mormon plot is very noticeable, especially as he is a typical Chinaman, of the California pattern, not above the tricks of his tribe - yet turning his secretive qualities to good and loyal effect as the plot thickens.

"Here are the two nearest problems that the American people have to deal with - the Chinese and the Mormon - most ingeniously worked out, and although the audience is in a broad ripple of laughter from beginning to end, there is an undercurrent of appeal constantly that this is a live story, and here is a matter that must be presently be settled in one or another way.

"The entirely novel humor and style of acting of Mr. De Wolf Hopper and Miss Ada Gilman have already been noticed. Both are such natural and such new personations, and both have such unusual physical advantages for the comic situation, that the matrimonial argument is irresistible whenever the diminutive wife takes her tall, strapping miner in hand. Mrs. Sophronia, with her unwavering attachment to the Mormon creed, and her undisguised horror of it when the reality os played off upon her by her own earnestness and her husband's joke, is altogether delightful.

"…In fine, the play is an argument, such as people can understand, against the hideous Mormon creed, which is suffered to exist by virtue of popular indifference to its every-day features. There will certainly be a change in public sentiment wherever the 'Hundred Wives' is played, for it is the one wife that comes out triumphant.

"Forcible as the plot is, it is none the less a clean plot, and all the more dramatic for being a true bill" (The Scrap Book, Volume 2, Sept. 1906- Feb. 1907, pp. 723-724, reprinting a review from the Philadelphia Ledger, 1880).

"This talking drama will occupy the boards at the opera house on Monday night next. The New Orleans Democrat pays the entertainment the following flattering tribute: The new American play, 'One Hundred Wives,' which has created an immense sensation wherever presented, was produced here last night and made a decided hit. The theater was filled from top to bottom, and the unanimous verdict of the immense audience was, that the drama is the best thing in its line which has ever been brought before a New Orleans audience. Though it is somewhat on the order of 'The Danites,' it is far superior to that play both in plot and detail. The company presenting it is an excellent one" (Decatur Review, January 28, 1882).

Producer-Actor De Wolf Hopper (1858-1935), who portrayed Confucius McGinley and was, presumably, the play's writer-director, was ninety-four marriages shy of "100 Wives." Married only six times, his fifth pass at the altar espoused him to actress Elda Furry, who later became the famed Old Hollywood gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper.

The world awaits a play with clean plot and true bill whose lead character is named Lao Tse McGonagle, Mencius O'Malley, or Zhaozhou Schwartz.

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Images of 100 Wives and De Wolf Hopper courtesy of Swann Galleries; image of 100 Wives flyer courtesy of Ebay, with our thanks.

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Arthur Miller On Marilyn Monroe's Sense Of Humor, Etc.

by Stephen J. Gertz

By Richard Avedon, 1958.

 "I am quite conceivably prejudiced, but I think this collection is a wonder of Marilyn’s wittiness. As Lillian Russell, Marilyn sits [on] the solid gold bicycle just inexpertly enough to indicate that she is, after all, a lady… Her hands lace around the bike handles so much more femininely than they grasp the fan as Clara Bow. And here again is the difference between imitation and interpretation, between making an affect and rendering a spirit."

The above quotation was partially cut from Arthur Miller's feature article, My Wife Marilyn, which appeared in Life magazine, December 22, 1958, in its Christmas issue to accompany photographer Richard Avedon's spread, Marilyn Monroe: Fabled Enchantresses. Within, Avedon shot Monroe  as Lillian Russell, Theda Bara, Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, and Jean Harlow. Miller’s essay describes Monroe’s “miraculous sense of sheer play” in channeling these celebrated sex symbols of the stage and screen and her role as their successor.

Miller's signed typescript draft of the article's final published version, with holograph corrections, revisions, and indicated cuts (almost a third of its final length), has come to market along with a signed typed letter by Miller to Life editor, Ralph Graves, dated October 31, 1958, that the playwright sent along with this final draft. They are being offered for $28,500.

 "Here is the article. The only stuff I have added is at the end, with the exception of one or two words in the body of the text. It reads like a precis of the original, I’m afraid, much of the feeling having been removed. But it will do, I guess. If you’ve got something better to use please do so. I’m sorry, again, that the wires got crossed and I conceived it for a much greater length. In any case, the photos are still miraculous."

The "feeling" remains within pages six through eleven of the eleven recto-only leaves of graph paper, which have been almost entirely struck through by Miller, who, once again, writes about Marilyn's sense of humor as evidenced in the photos. She possessed a keen sense of herself, completely self-aware and not only in on the joke but a collaborator in its creation. Though unschooled, this was a very smart woman; only the highly intelligent can play "dumb" with aplomb.

"As in life so in these pictures --- she salutes fantasy from the shore of the real until there comes a moment when she carries us, reality and all, into the dream with her, and we are grateful. Her wit here consists of her absolute commitment to two ordinarily irreconcilable opposites --- the real feminine and the man's fantasy of femininity. We know she knows the difference in these pictures, but is refusing to concede that there is any contradiction, and it is serious and funny at the same time."

The typescript, with its mounting revisions, examines in detail the nuances behind each pose and each portrait, exploring at length Monroe’s approach to portraying these prior stars and the cultural milieu from which they emerged.

Though a few lines and one longer passage from the original manuscript were salvaged for the published version, most were cut. These excisions, found here, include a comparison of Monroe’s face to “a lake under a changing sky” and Miller’s conviction that she is “the living proof that Boticelli was only painting the literal truth.” Where the published essay is a polished description of the electricity of Avedon’s set and Monroe’s ability to capture the “spirit of an age” and document “a kind of history of our mass fantasy, as far as seductresses are concerned,” this typescript reveals an unedited account of not only an inspired collaboration, but Miller’s beguilement over his wife’s many talents.

In Monroe's last interview before her death, appearing in Life on August 3, 1962, she discussed fame in general and hers in particular and pleaded to writer Richard Meryman, "Please don't make me a joke."

"The often bizarrely explained circumstances of her death and her image as a sex goddess/dumb blonde have at times prevented Monroe from being perceived as more than a caricature. She was, however, much more, and even in those 'dumb' roles she displayed an elegance worthy of respect. Her director in The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder, recognized this quality and called her 'an absolute genius as a comic actress.' Monroe never lost her desire for life or her sense of humor despite her tribulations, and she treated with humor and insight the depersonalization that came with her status and that often tormented her life and career" (American National Biography).

Once, in a throwaway quip employing a homonym to lampoon that dumb blonde sex-goddess image she, perhaps unconsciously, suggested a subtext that seriously addressed the inner conflict between what she represented to others and her true self:

"I thought symbols were something you clash."

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Typescript and letter images courtesy of Royal Books, currently offering these items, with our thanks.

Marilyn Monroe photographs from Avedon's Fabled Enchantresses series can be viewed here.
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Of Related Interest:

Marilyn Monroe: Avid Reader, Writer & Book Collector.

Heartbreaking Marilyn Monroe Letter Estimated at $30,000 - $50,000. 

The Most Significant Marilyn Monroe Autograph Document Comes To Auction.
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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.
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[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.

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Images courtesy of Royal Books, with our thanks.
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My Kingdom for a Hoax

by Alastair Johnston

Shakespeare's Richard the Third left us a few memorable phrases that have been delivered by everyone from Larry Olivier in a wig and mascara to Al Pacino in a backward baseball cap (but resisting the Brooklyn accent that would have made the king Richard da Turd), from Ian McKellen in jazz era Fascist drag to prize ham Richard Dreyfus in The Goodbye Girl, to Peter Cook in Black Adder. Richard the Third was even filmed thrice in the silent film era. Everyone knows, "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse"; the opening lines are also familiar:

Now is the winter of our discontent
made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds, that lowr'd upon our house,
In the deep bosom of the ocean bury'd.

The opening of Richard the Third in the First Folio of Shakespeare, 1623

In December 1960 my father was pleased to note a sign of literacy in Britain when a camping & sporting goods store ran an ad reading, "Now is the winter of our discount tents." But Shakespeare played fast and loose with the saga of this king, making him more of a Quentin Tarantino anti-hero than a real historical figure. He telescoped the action, making Richard's rise to the throne seem an overnight trajectory, though the time between Henry VI's murder (by his successor Edward IV) and funeral (1471), Clarence's imprisonment in the Tower (1477), to the Battle of Bosworth (1485), was fourteen years. 

The play was (probably) written and first performed in 1597. Shakespeare seems to have ignored published historical sources, but subsequently his version of the story has been taken as factual. The murder of Clarence (stabbed and drowned in a butt of malmsey) was pinned on Richard by the Lancastrians without much evidence. The princes in the Tower may have been killed by orders of Henry VII. Who knows? Did Prince Philip order the murder of Princess Diana for sleeping with Arab playboys?

Dr Johnson thought the play was overrated and Shakespeare "praised most, when praise is not most deserved; some parts are trifling, some shocking and some improbable."

Boydell's Shakspeare, 1803. Steevens' third edition, but a monumental work in English publishing. Printed by William Bulmer at the Shakspeare Printing-Office on Whatman paper and illustrated with numerous engravings. Reproduced from Peter Isaac's William Bulmer: the fine printer in context (London: Bain & Williams, 1993)

But George Steevens, Shakespeare's great editor, understood the secret of the play's success: it was an ideal role for actors like Burbage or Garrick because it showed a gamut of emotions from hero to lover, statesman to buffoon, from hypocrite to repenting sinner.

It was only a generation after Richard that Henry VIII sacked the monasteries in 1538. There was a free-for-all as the high-living priests were stripped of their accumulated wealth and luxuries, books, jewels and the like, while religious icons were smashed and destroyed, even graves were robbed. And the last Plantagenet King was forgotten — apart from a minor play. We know from Shakespeare that Richard's personal avatar was a boar.

The wretched, bloody, and usurping boar,
That spoil'd your summer fields and fruitful vines,
Swills your warm blood like wash, and makes his trough
In your embowell'd bosoms...

Things took an odd turn in May 2010 when someone with a metal detector found a silver boar pin and decided they had found the true site of the battle of Bosworth Field. Some coincidence. Like walking in Giza and stubbing your toe on an ankh ornament inscribed KLPTR in hieroglyphics. Even more coincidental is the discovery of the site of Greyfriars under a parking lot in Leicester (after others had searched for centuries), ten days ago, and, in less than a week, archaeologists had dug a trench, found the garden of alderman Robert Herrick (not that Robert Herrick) which had been located on the site, and soon hit upon the exact spot where the King was wrapped in a shroud and buried humbly over 500 years ago. Perhaps the posthumous saga of Richard 3 is a bit too Hollywood to be believed.

Many people have wondered what happened to the king after his death at the battle of Bosworth Field. Henry VII, not a pretty figure himself, didn't want him becoming sanctified, which might have happened if he had been returned to York and buried in the majestic minster there, so, after his naked corpse was paraded through Leicester (not as a warning to his followers, but to establish definitively his demise), he was turned over to some friars for a quiet interment. Bin Ladin disposal — burial at sea — wasn't thought of as an option.

York Minster (construction started in 627 C.E., still ongoing)

So the legendary King rises from the grave. It's better than Dracula! Today's news is that Richard wasn't a hunchback but had scoliosis — curvature of the spine — that made his right shoulder higher. He had an arrow in his back and an ax or sword blow to the skull that had finished him off. Maybe his last thought was "A hearse, a hearse! My kingdom for a hearse..." It's an incredible story, but could it be a hoax? We won't know until DNA tests are completed in a month or so, but it does seem as though they've found the ambitious duke who laid waste all rivals for the throne. If only the House of Windsor (né Battenberg) were so lively, instead of the sullen German upstarts they continue to be.

Shakespeare himself was almost lost to history, partly due to debased editions of his works but also perpetual copyright laws prevented their circulation. In 1680 one Crowne took Shakespeare's Henry VI, retitled the work The Miseries of Civil War, and claimed it as his own. Shakespeare's revival was due to Elizabethan scholar George Steevens, who restored the plays, and, since Steevens's re-edition, they have been continually performed and admired throughout the English-speaking world.

Steveens' edition, reprinted by Bensley in 1805, with a vignette after John Thurston, engraved by Charlton Nesbit: "Wisdom recovers from the grip of Time the laurels of which he had despoiled the tomb of Shakspeare."

Oddly, Steevens himself was involved in a hoax about another dead English monarch, the obscure Hardicanute. Steevens' dad was a director of the East India Company and young George had everything: "Every luxury was lavished on you — atheism, breast-feeding, circumcision." Well perhaps not as luxurious as Joe Orton's character — but he went to Eton and King's College, Cambridge. Then, with all the ease of a young gentleman born to a life of reading, dropped out of college. His life of privilege continued in a house on Hampstead Heath where he built a library of Elizabethan literature and collected Hogarths. He made daily rounds of the London bookshops and then came back to Hampstead to discuss his finds with his pal, Isaac Reed.

1803 stereotype edition of Steevens' Shakespeare, issued by Isaac Reed

In 1773 he produced his ten-volume Shakspeare. It was so good Dr Johnson deigned to add his name to the edition, though he didn't contribute much. But soon Edmond Malone and others muscled in on Steevens' turf so he turned his energies to subversion. While he was one of the first to expose the Chatterton-Rowley forgeries, and knew right off that William Henry Ireland's Shakespeare manuscripts were fakes, he also wrote a fictitious account of the Javanese upas tree, derived from the writing of an (imaginary) Dutch traveller (shades of Psalmanazaar). The Irelands' Shakespeare manuscripts had fooled a lot of people for a long time and certainly made an impact.

Reed published a new edition of Steevens' Shakespeare in 1785. At that point Steevens felt his authority had been usurped, so to reassert himself he created variorum editions, adding many valuable passages from Shakespeare's contemporaries to his notes.

Steevens last spectacular hoax was that of Hardicanute's tombstone. (A similar trick was pulled off in 1936 when members of the E Clampus Vitus fraternity conspired to plant the "Plate of Brasse" along the Northern California shoreline to give credibility to the notion that Francis Drake had anchored in Bolinas lagoon, or nearby, in his world tour of 1579. The perpetrators knew that Herbert Bolton, Director of the Bancroft Library at U C Berkeley, was desperately seeking the plate, so obliged him by planting a fake that was considered authentic for 40 years.)

Steevens's stunt was to get back at another Hogarth collector who had some early works that Steevens coveted, but who snubbed his advances for a trade. The Society of Antiquaries fell for the ruse, that a stone monument to King Hardaknut had been unearthed in the London suburb of Kennington, and the Gentleman's Magazine published this etching [above] of the inscription in Anglo-Saxon (concocted by Steevens). Son of King Canute, Hardy was another murderous monarch who eliminated rivals, taxed the bejesus out of his serfs, and when they objected, razed their cities. But right away someone noticed the etching technique of the inscription was modern, so the hoax didn't fly. 

Was Steevens malicious, or just a wry guy having fun at others' expense? I think the latter. And he had spent long hours poring over manuscripts and early printed books, reading "for my sake" and seeing "for my fake" over and over.

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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).

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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.

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[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.

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Program images courtesy of Between The Covers, with our thanks.
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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.
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Image courtesy of Thomas A. Goldwasser Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Life in Paris With George Cruikshank

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1821, journalist Pierce Egan published Life in London or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, esq., and his elegant friend, Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis, illustrated by the Cruikshank brothers, George and Robert.

It was an immediate, wild success. It's characters, Tom and Jerry, entered British pop-culture, spawning a French translation, six plays, and then traveled to America to begin a Tom and Jerry craze in the U.S. (Hanna-Barbera's popular animated cartoon series Tom & Jerry, cat v. mouse, harkens back to the original characters but has nothing to do with them).

In 1822, to capitalize on the success of Life in London, journalist David Carey published Life in Paris; Comprising the Rambles, Sprees, and Amours, of Dick Wildfire, or Corinthian Celebrity, and his Bang-up Companions, Squire Jenkins and Captain O'Shuffleton; with the Whimsical Adventures of the Halibut Family; Including Sketches of a Variety of other Eccentric Characters in the French Metropolis.

It, too was a Cruikshank-illustrated book but only by  George, and, as  Life in London, was originally issued in monthly parts. The frontispiece is similar to that created for Life in London. Life in Paris is one of the best of the many imitations of Egan's classic. Cruikshank contributed twenty-one hand-colored aquatint plates (including the engraved title) and twenty-two wood-engraved text vignettes.

Born in Scotland, author David Carey (1782-1824) worked for Edinburgh publisher, Archibald Constable, before moving to London and establishing himself as a journalist and poet; his first poem, An Elegy Written on the Death of a Friend, appeared in 1798 when he was sixteen years old.

Between 1803 and his death at age forty-two, he published eighteen books, primarily collections of his poetry. From 1809-1811 he was editor of The Poetical Magazine, published by Rudolph Ackermann as, according to Tooley (English Books With Color Plates), a vehicle to absorb all the poems submitted to the publisher's Repository of Arts for consideration. A year after publishing Life in Paris he returned to Scotland. In the year afterward, in 1824, he died of consumption.

Of the immortal George Cruikshank (1792-1878), little need be added here. Caricaturist and book illustrator, he was praised as the 'modern Hogarth" during his career, and his illustrations for books by Dickens and many other authors earned him an international reputation.

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[CRUIKSHANK, George, Illustrator]. CAREY, David. Life in Paris; Comprising the Rambles, Sprees, and Amours, of Dick Wildfire, or Corinthian Celebrity, and his Bang-up Companions, Squire Jenkins and Captain O'Shuffleton; with the Whimsical Adventures of the Halibut Family; Including Sketches of a Variety of other Eccentric Characters in the French Metropolis. Embellished with Twenty-One Coloured Plates representing Scenes from Real Life, designed and engraved by Mr. George Cruikshank. Enriched also with Twenty-Two Engravings on Wood, drawn by the same Artist, and executed by Mr. White. London: Printed for John Fairburn... sold by Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, [et al.], 1822.

First edition, Royal [Large Paper] Edition. Octavo (9 15/16 x  6 1/4 inches; 252 x 161mm.). xxiv, 489, [3 blank] pp. 4 pp. publishers advertisements (5 3/4 x 3 3/4 inches; 146 x 95 mm.).Twenty-one hand-colored aquatint plates (including engraved title) and twenty-two wood-engraved vignettes in text. Text and plates watermarked J. Whatman 1822. Bound without the directions to the binder leaf. Of the two cancels which were supplied with the final issue in parts, both (pp. 143-4  and pp. 335-6) have been inserted in this copy, in place of the original leaves.

Original pictorial boards. The front cover lettered in black and with five woodcut scenes printed in black "Dressing; Polishing; The Round of Pleasure; Dancing; Gaming", the back cover with five more woodcut scenes printed in black "Luxury; Labour; Amusement; Frippery; Finery". The spine lettered in black "Life in Paris / by David Carey / Royal Edition / Price £1. 11s. 6d. / 1822" and with two more woodcut scenes also printed in black. All edges uncut.

An extremely scarce, unrecorded edition. The woodcut illustrations on the boards are completely different than those of the small-paper copies cited by Abbey and Cohn. In fact, Abbey refers to the large-paper copies as measuring 8 7/8 x 5 11/16 inches, whereas this copy is a full one inch taller and half an inch wider, and so it is unclear whether Abbey had actually seen a Large Paper Copy in the original boards.

Abbey, Travel, 112. Cohn 109. Tooley 129.
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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Public Amusements in Paris With Gustave Doré

by Stephen J. Gertz

A remarkable and very important suite of lithographs from early in Doré’s career, Les différents publics de Paris contains twenty-one original lithographs, superbly colored by a contemporary (publisher’s?) hand.

The series depicts Parisian society at the circus, the theater, the public garden, at magic performances, a puppet show in the park, a reading in the imperial library (this is a particularly famous Doré image), and at the amphitheater of the medical school, among other settings.`

“These twenty lithographs are studies of massed humanity, ranging from audiences at the great Parisian theaters to the crowds at a wrestling match or a Punch and Judy show. Without exception they are striking in conception and fertile in detail... each of Doré’s scenes is based on close observation, and the album provides valuable testimony to the manners of the day."

“[‘Les Travaux d’Hercule’] and the more imposing albums which followed [Les différents publics de Paris] remain too little known even among Doré’s ardent admirers because of their great scarcity. They show the artist at his most engaging, bearing witness to a lively sense of humor, now broad, now sophisticated, which was muted in his later illustrations” (Ray p. 327).

“All three of these lithographic albums are rare. Most copies were long ago taken apart to sell the lithographs individually.

"There are also full-color versions of the Ménagerie and Publics, and those are particularly desirable” (Dan Malan,  Gustave Doré, Adrift on Dreams of Splendor. A Comprehensive Biography and Bibliography).

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DORÉ, Gustave. Les différents publics de Paris. [Paris]: Au Bureau du Journal Amusant, n.d. [1854]. Lithographic printed title and 20 contemporary hand-coloured lithographic plates, all mounted on stubs. Oblong quarto (262 x 350 mm.).

Ray: Art of the French Illustrated Book 241; Rahir: Bibliothèque de l’amateur, 404; Beraldi VI.30; Leblanc 90.

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Images courtesy of Ars Libri Ltd., with our thanks.
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When Goldilocks Had Silver Hair and Trod the British Stage

by Stephen J. Gertz

From: COOPER, [T. George]. The Story of the Three Bears,
of Little Silver Hair and the Fairies,
as performed at the Haymarket Theatre in 1854.

In 1854, Goldilocks, that fickle food taster, chair sitter, bed sleeper, and precocious felon of the breaking and entering ilk, brought her act to London's Haymarket Theatre for a special Easter performance.

But you would not have recognized her. She had silver hair.

Who knew that the story of the girl with the golden tresses who home invades and chow-down fresses had been adapted to the stage? And what was a fairy queen doing in the production?

In this dramatization of the classic childrens story, the heroine is called Silverhair, she runs away from her mother to escape a wooing squire, and winds up at the house of the three bears, who are not happy with the picky, picky, picky child for eating their porridge, sitting in their chairs, and sleeping in their bed. Silverhair is rescued from their wrath by the fairy queen. 

While the story has been around for approximately 200 years, the earliest recorded version is The Story of The Three Bears metrically related, with illustrations placing and dating  it to Cecil Lodge in September 1831. One  Eleanor Mure had written the story in verse and illustrated it for her nephew from the story she  knew through oral tradition. In Mure's version  it is an old woman  who intrudes into the bears' home, sampling their food, etc. (Opie, Iona and Peter. The Classic Fairy Tales. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974, pp. 199-200).

In 1837, Robert Southey published the story in volume four of his seven volume collection of essays, The Doctor &C (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Green, and Longman, 1834-38), under the title The Story of the Three Bears. Here, too, the intruder was an old woman. Another early version is known as Scrapfoot, and a fox is the moocher in the bear's house.

In 1850, however, the fox and old woman were jettisoned when the story was published in the anthology, A Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young Children (London: Grant and Griffith, & Joseph Cundall). The protagonist was now a young girl named Silver Hair, and it is in this iteration that the story was adapted for the Haymarket Theatre's 1854 Easter production. In 1855 she became Silver-Locks in Aunt Mavor's Nursery Tales (London: George Routledge & Co.). In 1868, she became Golden Hair in Aunt Friendly's Nursery Book (London: Frederick Warne), and somewhere a scholar is probably investigating whether the blonds have more fun trope is somehow connected to Golden Hair; only her  hairdresser knows for sure. In 1904's The Old Nursery Stories and Rhymes (London: Blackie & Son), Goldilocks made her debut.

The old woman was too hot. The fox was too cold. Silver Hair was too  soft. Golden Hair was too hard. Goldilocks was just right. The name stuck.

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COOPER, [T. George]. The Story of the Three Bears, of Little Silver Hair and the Fairies, as performed at the Haymarket Theatre as an Easter piece in 1854. Quarto. Twenty ink drawings by T. George Cooper with quotations from the script and the musical score. Two drawings full-page, the remainder two to a page, drawn directly into a contemporary, gilt morocco Victorian album.

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Image courtesy of Bloomsbury Auctions, offering this item as lot 462 in its Books, Manuscripts, Maps, and Works on Paper sale, December 15, 2011, with our thanks. It is estimated to sell for £400-£600 ($627-$940).

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