Opera Stories for Young and Old

After what has seemed like an eternity away from the blog -- an eternity filled with wonderful things, such baby showers and international travel, as well as less wonderful things, such as illness and academic work -- we return this week with a glimpse into how children’s literature can be enjoyed by adults as well.

The book this week is Elizabeth M. Wheelock’s Stories of Wagner Operas Told for Children. It was first published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company of Indianapolis in 1907 and retailed for $1.25 (about $30 in today’s money); my copy is of the expanded second edition, published by the same company in June 1910. It was printed and bound by Braunworth & Company of Brooklyn, New York, one of Bobbs-Merrill’s preferred printing houses. Bobbs-Merrill, which ranked amongst the top firms in the nation in the first decades of the twentieth century, is perhaps best known as the publisher of Ayn Rand and the first firm to publish the early stories of L. Frank Baum (author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz).

Wheelock’s Stories of Wagner Operas belongs to an intriguing turn-of-the-century subgenre of children’s literature and collected stories based on the narratives of famous operas. Other works in this group include John Prendergast’s Great Operas Told for Children (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1909) and, before that, Anna Alice Chapin’s Wonder Tales from Wagner: Told for Young People (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1898). Wheelock’s approach was to write the stories as if they were being read aloud to a group of children, using the present tense and a relaxed, often colloquial (for 1907) style. According to Cincinnati bookseller Michael Cunningham, “Apparently the author wrote this book after years of telling children the stories, and they do have an easy, conversational manner.” This conversational approach was adopted also by Florence Akin (“primary teacher in the Irvington School, Portland, Oregon”) in her 1915 Opera Stories From Wagner: A Reader for Primary Grades (Boston: Houghton Mifflin) because, as Akin writes in her note “To the Teacher”, such a style “will be found a valuable aid in the teaching of expression.” Because of the epic, often fantasy-like, nature of the typical opera narrative, the intersection between opera and children’s literature has continued to enjoy great success into the present (a quick search on Amazon.com turns up 341 opera-related titles in the Children’s Books section and 165 in the Teens section).

In its first edition, Wheelock’s collection included seven stories, but for the second three additional popular operas were added at the end of the book: Tannhäuser (pp. 209-229), Tristan and Isolde (pp. 231-261), and Parsifal (pp. 263-[302]). Carried over from the first edition were The Master Singers of Nuremberg (pp. 1-45), The Flying Dutchman (pp. 47-65), Lohengrin (pp. 67-99), The Rhinegold (pp. 101-123), The Walkyries (pp. 125-153), Siegfried (pp. 155-179), and The Dusk of the Gods (pp. 181-207). The only story that appeared in the first edition but was omitted from the second edition is Rienzi because, according to Wheelock’s Preface, “it is, now, never given in this country.”

The pages measure 13.5cm x 20.25cm and are of a heavy, machine-pressed stock with gatherings in octavo. It is bound in hardcover, with dark green cloth and gilded titling on the spine; a full-size pictorial plate is pasted to the front cover (a white swan in water under a crescent moon, with golden lettering for the title and author). The binding is in good condition; some slight water-staining on the fore-edge of the text block has leached onto the interior of some pages, but only slightly and never to the detriment of the text itself. Aside from the inscription and bookplate (more on this below) the only reader’s marks of note are penciled check-marks on the table of contents, next to the chapters The Master Singers of Nuremberg, Lohengrin, and The Walkyries. The preliminaries include a blank flyleaf followed by a half-title and a glossy illustrative frontispiece of Lohengrin in a boat pulled by a swan (black-and-white art nouveau style; unsigned). Following the title page and copyright imprint is Wheelock’s preface, the table of contents, and an internal half-title. Each chapter is prefaced by a page with the story title on the recto and a blank verso. The book concludes with two blank flyleaves. It was apparently issued with a dust-jacket (some dealers online list their copies as still in the jacket), but my copy is without.

Elizabeth Marian Wheelock was born on April 6, 1859 in the town of North Attleboro, Massachusetts and died in 1917 of pneumonia. She was, at the time of her death, the only woman instructor on the faculty of the Horace Mann Boys’ School in New York. The following brief biography is from her obituary in the October 21, 1917 Sunday New York Times:

She was trained for teaching at the Rhode Island Normal School and instructed in the public schools of Westerly, R. I., until she became a member of the teaching staff at the Walnut Hill School, a private institution in Cincinnati, Ohio. She joined the Faculty of Horace Mann School sixteen years ago [1901]. When Horace Mann was divided into separate schools for boys and girls, Mrs. Wheelock remained at the Boys’ School. She had published a volume of Wagnerian opera stories for children. Mrs. Wheelock was the widow of George R. Wheelock, an attorney of Boston, Mass.

As noted above, a custom-printed bookplate is pasted inside the front cover. The plate features the black-and-white image of a branch growing off a pine tree, the roman numerals MCMVI, the arabic numerals 182, and in all majuscules the name Carl A. Weyerhaeuser. Inscribed in blue ballpoint-pen ink just above the bookplate’s name is the dedication “For Walter T Charles Rosenberry from”.

Weyerhaeuser (1901-1996; left) was a Minnesota native from a family well-established in the timber industry (hence, I assume, the art on his bookplate). His passion was towards the fine arts, however, and he went off to Hotchkiss College (1919) and eventually Harvard (1923). Throughout his life, Weyerhaeuser became a dedicated collector of art, prints, paintings, books, and Shaker furniture. Through these activities he became Chairman of the board for the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, Massachusetts (which today houses many of the works he collected), funded the Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints and Design position at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, and was a founding member and trustee of Hancock Shaker Village. He and his family were also active contributors to, and leaders of, The Forest History Society. In 1975, to recognize the importance of its native son, the Morrison County, Minnesota Historical Society named its museum in Little Falls after Weyerhaeuser, who had been a longtime supporter of the organization. In 1997, Jan Warner of the Historical Society wrote a brief but informative biographical sketch of the man, highlighting his lifetime of philanthropy and collecting.

The Rosenberry family was linked to Weyerhaeuser through the first marriage of his sister, Sarah-Maud Sivertsen (1907-2008). In 1930, Sarah-Maud married Walter S. Rosenberry, Jr. and they had four children (Walter, Charles, Elise, and Lucy); they divorced in 1949 and in 1954 she married Robert Sivertsen. I’m not entirely certain who the “Walter T. Charles Rosenberry” of the inscription is; at first I thought it might be Weyerhaeuser’s nephew (Sarah-Maud and Walter Jr.’s son), but his middle initial is “W.”, not “T. C.”. In the Branch County, Michigan marriage index a Walter C. Rosenberry (the only full permutation of that name I can find) is listed as having married one Lucille Agnes Hull on February 23, 1915. Perhaps this is the same man as the one meant in the inscription, but if so, I can’t imagine why Weyerhaeuser would give his book as a gift to an older man. The inscription is written in what looks like relatively mature handwriting, so perhaps this was a gift of a book from Weyerhaeuser’s juvenile days to an old friend?

According to the March-August 1908 issue of the magazine The Bookman (Vol. 27, p. 424), Wheelock’s Stories of Wagner Operas “tells the stories...in a manner which will attract and interest children” and no doubt it did this. But books often have a habit of slipping free from their intended uses and being adopted in unexpected ways. Apparently this happened with Wheelock’s stories. According to contemporary references, her book was often used by adult opera-goers (particularly novices) in order to familiarize themselves with plots and characters before attending the show (no doubt an especially appealing tactic if one is going to attend in the company of aficionados and one does not wish to look the fool). Wheelock herself admits to this unintended use when, in a savvy bit of subliminal marketing in the preface of the second edition, she notes that the three additional stories were added “at the suggestion of many mature readers who have found the original collection more useful for a quick review of the operas than even the librettos themselves.”

A review of the book in the April 11, 1908 issue of the newspaper The Deseret Evening News (p. 21) highlights this additional use of her stories, while praising the overall quality of the tales and Wheelock’s writing style. The review merits quoting in full:

As a descriptive title “Stories of Wagner Operas Told for Children,” doesn’t quite do justice to Mrs. Wheelock’s book. For not merely does she tell the stories but she gives the very spirit of the operas, and interprets them so clearly and so fully that you can “see the things happening.” The stories are brimming with interest not merely for children but for grown-ups as well -- or all, in fact, who want their opera lore put in a simple, concise and entertaining way.

They have a sort of vocal directness, because they are actual conversations, set down exactly as they have been many times “talked off” by the author to children of all ages. There can be nothing but admiration for the skill and sympathy Mrs. Wheelock shows in putting into story form the work of the immortal master singer.

With this additional information, I might return to my puzzlement over the inscription and speculate on an explanation. Perhaps Weyerhaeuser had once enjoyed his copy of Wheelock’s Stories of Wagner as a boy, but, when he was a bit older, knowing that his older relative, Charles Rosenberry, needed a good primer on the stories behind Wagner’s often impenetrable operas, he generously (as was his wont) gifted the book away.

A Salmagundi of English Anecdotes

Knowing of my interest in tracking down the provenance of certain volumes in my collection, a fellow book-collector has invited me to discover what I can about a special copy of this week’s book. As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m interested in issues of bibliographic proximity -- whether that term applies to anthologies or collected editions (the proximity of texts to each other) or to book collections (the proximity of particular books to each other). Apparently this week’s book shared some close proximity with a collection of four of the rarest and most valuable (monetarily and textually) books in English literary history -- provoking me to reflect on the vast network of the “book web”, or the interconnectedness of the many volumes sitting on our shelves that at one time or another in their lives shared space with a volume now possibly miles or even continents away.

The title is A Book for a Rainy Day: Or, Recollections of the Events of the Last Sixty-Six Years by John Thomas Smith (1766-1833; shown here). The first edition, published by Richard Bentley of New Burlington Street in London, appeared in 1845 and was quickly followed by a second edition in the same year; ironically, the first edition is far more common than the limited second edition. This copy is of the second edition. The printer for both was Schulze & Company of 13 Poland Street in London. Bentley and Schulze are perhaps best known for being the publisher-printer team behind the first book publication of Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Subsequent editions followed in 1861, 1900, and 1905 (edited by Wilfred Whitten). In 1846, the book was adapted into Charles Mackay’s two-volume An Antiquarian Ramble in the Streets of London, with Anecdotes of Their More Celebrated Residents.

Smith -- a character on the London social scene for much of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century -- had been since 1816 the “keeper” of the British Museum’s prints and drawings collection, was an accomplished artist (mostly of portraits) and the author of several other works, most notably a study of London street life and crime titled Vagabondia and a biography of the sculptor Nollekens and His Times -- a book that was, according to the Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. 14, “unmatched for malicious candour and vivid detail”.

As for his Book for a Rainy Day, the Cambridge History describes it as “one of the most entertaining and most trustworthy memorials of [Smith’s] period. Published twelve years after his death, it forms a valuable corrective to the flashy fictions of Egan and his life.” The book takes the form of a highly detailed, largely autobiographical diary of London society over the course of Smith’s life, ranging from theatre news to political scandal to high society gossip to literary anecdotes to the latest fashions to international news and even weather reports. Of the author himself, the Cambridge History reports that he “had a keen curiosity about things and people past and present, a retentive memory and a gift for gossip.”

The goal of the book seems to be one of eclectic variety organized around the years of the author’s life. As Smith puts it in his preface:

Some may object to my vanity, in expecting the reader of the following pages to be pleased with so heterogeneous a dish. It is, I own, what ought to be called salmagundi; or, it may be likened to various suits of clothes, made up of remnants of all colours. One promise I can make, that as my pieces are mostly of new cloth, they will last the longer. Dr. Johnson has said: “All knowledge is of itself of some value. There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable, that I would not rather know, than not.”

The book is bound in wonderfully sturdy feather-marbled boards with deep brown leather spine and corners. There are six compartments with raised bands down the spine with decorative tooling and a black leather title band with gold lettering. The edges of the pages, the inside of the front and back covers, and the recto of the front flyleaf and verso of the back flyleaf all share the same colorful marbling pattern.

The pages measure 12cm x 19.5cm and are quite healthy, with very little foxing and no tears or damage (except for the front fly, which is coming loose at the top). There are no watermarks or chain-lines; the paper was, as with almost all non-specialized printing paper after 1805 in England, wove-made on a machine. The book’s pagination runs [i]-iv, [1]-311 (the first edition may be distinguished from the second in its pagination; it runs up to 306). Its collational formula seems to be 8^o: [#] [A²] B¹²-O¹¹: $1, 2, 3 [5]. Thus, it seems to be an “octavo in twelves” (a full sheet folded in eight with a half-sheet folded in four).

On the verso of the front fly, and inserted after the fly (on a slip of stationery from Botleys Park Hospital Management Committee of Chertsey in Surrey) are an assortment of owners’ marks. Those written on the fly are cryptic and are combination of various pencils and a purple stamped “N6L”; the pencil marks include the notation "Finneron, Woking. Nov | 54".

Pasted on the slip of stationery, in the same hand as the “Finneron, Woking. Nov | 54” notation (though annotated in black and blue inks, not pencil) are slips of paper cut from advertisements for various editions of the book. The slip advertising the 1905 edition is annotated with “Myer, London. Jan | 57”; the first slip advertising the 1845 edition (first) is not annotated; the second slip advertising the 1845 first edition is annotated “Beaucham<> London. 1960”; the final slip advertises Mackay’s 1846 adaptation and is annotated “Hammond, B’haus. Oct | 56”. Whomever bough the book was apparently fastidious about recording its values in various editions when they came up for sale; if the inscription on the fly is the mark of when and where it was first purchased by this owner, it seems that he or she bought the book from E. J. Finneron, a bookseller in the English town of Woking since at least 1935.

There are two bookplates, and these bring me back to the topic of tracking down interesting provenances and the larger conceptual idea of the interconnectedness of our books through their past proximity to one another.

One bookplate shows a hunter’s horn, tied and apparently hanging from a bowed ribbon, on top of a barrel that is lying on its side. The cryptic initials JFTD encircle the horn in a clockwise direction. The second bookplate, pasted on the inside of the front cover, is more clear: a ribbon reading “Sub Tegmine Fagi” (“Concealed Beneath the Beech Tree”) crowns a beech tree that rises from a particolored band. Below this crest is the owner’s name: Henry B. H. Beaufoy, F.R.S. (“F.R.S.” stands for Fellow of the The Royal Society).

Beaufoy (shown below) was likely the book’s first owner. From roughly 1784 through 1843, Beaufoy was one of Europe’s most celebrated and prestigious hot air ballonists; his numerous ascents contributed unprecedented support to the nascent discipline of aeronautics, as well as providing new information to cartographers, meteorologists, and physicists in England and on the continent. Beaufoy was also a great collector of both coins (he wrote a well-regarded book on early English “tokens”) and, more importantly for my purposes, books. Beaufoy collected across a range of topics and genres. Most famously, however, was his assembling together in one library a copy of the first (1623), second (1632), third (1663), and fourth (1685) folios of the plays of William Shakespeare (his library was dispersed at auction by Christie’s in July 1909 and the four folios were eventually split up at auction in July 1912). To put it briefly, then -- and to return to this post’s initial premise -- holding Beaufoy’s copy of A Book for a Rainy Day is likely to be as close as I’ll ever come to all four of the seventeenth century Shakespeare folio collections at once.

Sleuthing Out a Notable Early Owner for a Wordsworth Limited Edition

A weekend trip back home to Salem regularly includes a visit to the Antiques Gallery at Pickering Wharf. One of the dealers there has a large selection of collectible and antiquarian books, most are decently priced and occasionally there’s some interesting turn-over in the stock as well. This week’s book was a bargain find from this store.

The book is a craft-printed, limited edition publication of seventy-five Sonnets by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850). It was published in 1910 by Houghton Mifflin and printed by its Riverside Press division in Cambridge, MA in a limited run of 440 copies (Houghton Mifflin came into being in 1880 when the famed publishing firm of Ticknor and Fields merged with The Riverside Press). My copy is number 269. According to the Library of Congress, it was designed by artisan Bruce Rogers (the LC holds copy number 428, which had once belonged to Rogers). It was originally published in a protective slipcase but my copy no longer has the box. The Publisher’s Weekly Vol. 78 (Dec. 10, 1910; p. 2335) indicates that the book originally retailed for $5, or about $120 in modern USD -- quite a hefty sum for one book (PW also, however, erroneously lists the print-run as only 400 copies). Its value today is between $50 and $100, depending on condition.

It is bound in boards covered over with a thin vellum. The spine is a dark striped cloth with a decorative paper label for the title pasted on. The pages are very roughly cut (it was sold with the pages uncut), measuring approximately 16cm x 21cm, and are made of a rich, heavy woven stock bearing the watermark: PM / FABRIANO / ITALY. (Fabriano is a town in Ancona province in central Italy, on the eastern slope of the Apennine ridge; since the 1200s it has thrived as the pioneering paper-making center of Europe and was actually, in 1276, the birthplace of paper watermarking.) I haven’t been able to identify “PM”, but I’ve found descriptions of the mark in a book from 1930 and a print from 1932.

There are no signatures and there is no pagination, though each sonnet appears on its own separately numbered leaf (recto). The collational formula may be expressed as 8^o: [A⁸]-[J⁸] [K⁴] [π]. The final blank flyleaf is a different paper, bearing 3.5cm chain-lines and part of a different watermark (not discernible); it is conjugate with the rear pastedown. The contents run as follows: two blanks; title page; two leaves (recto and verso) of “Table of First Lines”; inner title for section “Nature”; poems 1-24; inner title for section “Man”; poems 25-48; inner title for section “The Poet”; poems 49-75. Some of the poems within each section form short sequences of their own and these are often given a heading title on the first poem of the sequence along with Roman numerals for each poem in the sequence.

The copy is in average condition. As noted above, the slipcase is missing; the spine has suffered some chipping cracking. The initial flyleaf is discolored slightly from a reader’s insertion (more below). Whomever cut the pages did an odd job of it: at least one page has its upper outside corner clipped and three pages have been cropped quite severely (never resulting in the loss of text, though). I suspect that whomever it was that cut the pages open (probably the first owner) accidentally tore those pages when he or she was cutting them open and so, to clean up the tear, they trimmed the page off to the depth of the whole rip. A smudged (inky?) fingerprint appears on the title page.

Some early owner has written on the leaf bearing poem 51, using a watery brown ink (fountain pen, most likely) and very blocky handwriting. In the upper outside corner is written “Ref. / 812 / W92 / So.” and in the lower outside corner, “21101”. This seems like a library call number, but it does not belong to any catalog system I’m aware of (and why Wordsworth would be grouped with “Reference” rather than into poetry is unclear to me). There’s no other evidence of library provenance, but I suspect that my copy is indeed ex libris (which would explain the absence of the slipcase as well).

An early reader (or perhaps two) has also extended the collection of poetry to include five more verses. Inserted between the end of the Table of First Lines and the inner title “Nature” there is a leaf torn out of Arthur Quiller-Couch’s 1919 edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900. The leaf (pages 599/600) is from the Wordsworth section and offers up four more poems by the writer: “Evening on Calais Beach”, “On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic, 1802”, “England, 1802: i”, and “England, 1802: ii” (poems 521-524 in Quiller-Couch’s collection). This is printed on the usual cheap anthology paper and looks as if it has been folded in half at one point.

The fifth added poem is pasted inside the front cover of the book. It is the late nineteenth century poem “The Chambered Nautilus”, by famed Massachusetts jurist, poet, essayist, physician, and mustache Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935), who served on the United States Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932. The poem meditates on the deeper meaning of a simple, everyday object, taking the nautilus as a symbol for the intellectual development of man and the fact that, as we mature, we outgrow our protective shells. The paper on which the poem is printed seems to be a cheap newsprint (a decorative border is just visible around the poem itself, but nothing seems to show through from the other side); the acid leeching from this to the recto of the facing flyleaf is the cause of the discoloration on that page.

Including Holmes’s poem in a collection of Wordsworth’s flights of fancy might seem odd. I can’t say for certain why an early reader would think to associate these two radically different poets, but I do have a (completely speculative) theory. Some of the books being sold by the dealer at the Antiques Gallery at Pickering Wharf bear a telling bookplate inside their front covers: the chambered nautilus icon used by Oliver Wendell Holmes to mark his own books (the Latin phrase, “per ampliora ad altiora” means “through breadth to depth”).

Perhaps this unique collection of Wordsworth’s poems came, also, from Holmes’s library (during his tenure, it should be noted, on the Supreme Court) -- perhaps the awkward cutting job of the pages was his, perhaps also his is the smudgy fingerprint on the title page. And perhaps the decision to paste his own “Nautilus” poem inside the cover, in the place customarily occupied by a bookplate, was his as well.