Young Folks’ Favorite Authors

This is one of four playing cards featuring Howard Pyle in The Fireside Game Company’s Young Folks’ Favorite Authors, which was manufactured and sold by The United States Playing Card Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, starting in 1897.

Young Folks’ Favorite Authors was one of many “author” card games, but the first to include Pyle. An advertisement in The American Stationer for November 11, 1897, said:

The Fireside Game Company’s

NEW, ENAMELED,

Educational Games.

This new line of enameled card games is the finest ever issued.

Handsomely put up in bright-colored boxes, printed in bronzes or stamped with gold leaf.

These games are educational and instructive as well as entertaining, and afford endless amusement for young and old, at the same time unconsciously imparting much valuable information.

Young Folks’ Favorite Authors - the ad also said - featured “Portraits of writers dear to our young people. Such favorites as Pansy, Louisa M. Alcott, Oliver Optic, Eugene Field, etc. The game is played by the conventional Author's rules.”

And, speaking of the rules, here they are...

Twelfth Night, 1906

In 1904 Howard Pyle was elected a non-resident member of New York City’s prestigious Century Association - his name having been proposed by publisher J. Henry Harper and seconded by painter John White Alexander. Late the following year, Pyle was asked to design the invitation and program for the club’s traditional Twelfth Night celebration, to be held on January 6, 1906.

Either out of his own enthusiasm, or a desire to impress his fellow members, Pyle turned what should have been a quick and casual job into something much more ambitious. “I am afraid you are taking the Twelfth Night drawing too seriously,” warned his friend Frank Millet, who was coordinating the project (and who later went down with the Titanic):

The committee is very anxious to have something to send out with the notices which must be issued soon and they do not expect an elaborate work nor would they desire to give you much trouble about it.... Dr Curtis apparently dreams of something which in a few lines of the pencil will illustrate fully his description of the revels at Eagle-roost. But you can see from the old programs I sent you that elaboration is not necessary.

Millet wrote that on November 19, 1905, but I gather it was too late for Pyle to rein himself in. The invitation (which was also issued in grey-blue wrappers) and the program were printed under his supervision by John M. Rogers on Orange Street (“opposite the Old Malt House,” reads the colophon) in Wilmington, Delaware. Rogers had, among other things, printed Pyle’s Catalogue of Drawings Illustrating the Life of Gen. Washington and of Colonial Life, The Ghost of Captain Brand, and The Divinity of Labor - all in 1897 - and The Constitution and By-Laws of the Howard Pyle School of Art in 1903.

In addition to the drawings, Pyle did all the lettering seen here, except for the verse stanzas in “Centuria’s Call” and the portion of the paragraph beneath “The Programme of the Festival”: these were set in Fifteenth Century (later known as Caslon Antique), which Pyle began to use almost as soon as it was issued by the type foundry of Barnhart Brothers & Spindler.

And yet, for all his work, Pyle may not even have attended the Twelfth Night festivities: instead, he may have gone to the Franklin Inn Club’s dinner - for which he had also decorated the program cover - held the same evening in Philadelphia.

(By the way, Dr. Edward Curtis (1838-1912), whom Millet mentioned above, co-performed the autopsy on the body of Abraham Lincoln in 1865.)

A Howard Pyle Bookmark

I plan to write more in depth about Howard Pyle's involvement with To Have and To Hold, the novel by Mary Johnston, but until then, take a look at this odd scrap of Pylean ephemera...

It's a promotional bookmark which Pyle executed in its entirety (and by that I mean he drew the picture and did the hand-lettering and the border). The portrait is in charcoal and it appears in the background of a 1902 photograph of Pyle taken by his student and sometime photographer, Arthur Ernst Becher (1877-1960). It was initially published in Art Interchange for January 1903.

Becher, by the way, was a friend of Edward Steichen from their days in Milwaukee, and his photographs were shown in the first exhibition of the Photo-Secession (1902) and in Alfred Stieglitz's Camera-Work (October 1903).

And there's certainly something Steichenesque about this Pyle portrait - but perhaps I'm being superficial if it calls to mind Steichen's photo of Rodin: an artist in his studio (presumably) with an example of his work ethereally floating in the background - sort of like those "spirit" photos championed by Arthur Conan Doyle where an image of a dead loved one hovers around the portrait of a living person. Granted, this photograph of Pyle lacks the "mystery" and "atmosphere" of Steichen's Rodin, but still...

Lost Pylean Ephemera, 1900

Who knows how many unidentified pieces of Pylean ephemera are still out there. For instance, this 1900 advertising booklet for Houghton, Mifflin and Company, which managed to miss both bibliographies. It is uncredited, but Pyle's distinctive hand-lettering gives it away.