Happy birthday, bad boy Frank Harris

There's just something intriguing about this bad boy of letters. This is a reprint of a previously publish profile of a man whose birthday happens to fall on Valentine's Day.

 It is the birthday of journalist and raconteur Frank Harris (1856), who served as editor of the Saturday Review, cultivated friendships with Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw (about whom he wrote biographies), and worked as a cowboy in the American west. He is probably best remembered, however, for his sexually explicit and highly exaggerated memoir My Life and Loves (1931). It was known for its racy drawings, nude photographs, and gossipy details about public figures such as Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Carlyle, George Meredith, Cecil Rhodes, and Wilde.

He was born in Ireland of Welsh parents, sent to boarding school in Wales, ran away from school at age 13 and went to America, where he supported himself with a series of odd jobs, including as a construction worker on the Brooklyn Bridge. He went to Chicago and worked in the meat packing industry, then went west and became a cowboy. He earned a law degree at the University of Kansas and settled down to practice law.

That didn't last long though, and he returned to England, then traveled throughout  Europe. He worked as a foreign correspondent for American newspapers, then became editor of several London papers before settling in at the Saturday Review. Beginning in 1908, Harris started writing novels and other books. Among them were The Bomb (1908), The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story (1909), and The Yellow Ticket and Other Stories (1920).

In 1914, Harris came back to America. He became editor of Pearson's Magazine, which had a slightly socialist bent to it. Once, during World War I, an issue of the magazine was banned at the U.S. Post Office because of its political content. However, the magazine continued to survive during the war years, despite the dim view many took of the leftist press at the time. Harris became an American citizen in 1921.

In 1922, Harris went to Germany to arrange to privately publish his racy memoir. He published four volumes from 1922 to 1927. For 40 years, it was banned in Britain and the United States. However, in Paris, it once sold for a much as $100. In 1931,  notorious Obelisk Press in Paris (the same one that later published risque volumes by Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin) produced a four-volume edition of Harris' memoir.

Happy birthday, George Bernard Shaw

It is the birthday of Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925 and an Academy Award for his screen adaptation of his play Pygmalion in 1938. Shaw was an outspoken socialist who championed the working class. His black comedy plays made fun of social ills as he dealt with such issues as class privilege, education, health care, marriage, government, and religion. Shaw's best-known work may be Pygmalion (1912), about a professor of phonetics who trains a Cockney flower girl to pass for a duchess. It was adapted for film twice and as the 1956 musical and 1964 film My Fair Lady. Other major works include Candida (1898), John Bull's Other Island (1904), Major Barbara (1905), Man and Superman (1905), Heartbreak House (1920), and Saint Joan (1923).

Frank Harris wrote of Wilde, Shaw and more

Frank Harris

It is the birthday of journalist and raconteur Frank Harris (1856), who served as editor of the Saturday Review, cultivated friendships with Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw (about whom he wrote biographies), and worked as a cowboy in the American west. He is probably best remembered, however, for his sexually explicit and highly exaggerated memoir My Life and Loves (1931). It was known for its racy drawings, nude photographs, and gossipy details about public figures such as Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Carlyle, George Meredith, Cecil Rhodes, and Wilde.

He was born in Ireland of Welsh parents, sent to boarding school in Wales, ran away from school at age 13 and went to America, where he supported himself with a series of odd jobs, including as a construction worker on the Brooklyn Bridge. He went to Chicago and worked in the meat packing industry, then went west and became a cowboy. He earned a law degree at the University of Kansas and settled down to practice law.

That didn't last long though, and he returned to England, then traveled throughout  Europe. He worked as a foreign correspondent for American newspapers, then became editor of several London papers before settling in at the Saturday Review. Beginning in 1908, Harris started writing novels and other books. Among them were The Bomb (1908), The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story (1909), and The Yellow Ticket and Other Stories (1920).

In 1914, Harris came back to America. He became editor of Pearson's Magazine, which had a slightly socialist bent to it. Once, during World War I, an issue of the magazine was banned at the U.S. Post Office because of its political content. However, the magazine continued to survive during the war years, despite the dim view many took of the leftist press at the time. Harris became an American citizen in 1921.

In 1922, Harris went to Germany to arrange to privately publish his racy memoir. He published four volumes from 1922 to 1927. For 40 years, it was banned in Britain and the United States. However, in Paris, it once sold for a much as $100. In 1931,  notorious Obelisk Press in Paris (the same one that later published risque volumes by Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin) produced a four-volume edition of Harris' memoir.

Happy birthday, Hilaire Belloc

It is the birthday of English writer Hilaire Belloc (1870), who was one of the most prolific writers of the early 20th century and is considered, along with G.K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells, among the Big Four of Edwardian letters. Except for a brief stint as an editor, Belloc made his living writing. An admirer once asked him why he wrote so much. He replied, "Because my children are howling for pearls and caviar." Belloc may be best remembered for his humorous poetry. His Cautionary Tales for Children (1907) was decidedly not for children. Here is a reading of one of his best known poems.

Frank Harris' autobiography was too explicit

Frank Harris

It is the birthday of journalist, editor and publisher Frank Harris (1856), whose four-volume memoir My Life and Loves (1922) was banned for being too explicit. Born in Galway, Ireland, he was educated in Wales. He studied at the University of Kansas then returned to England. He was editor of several newspapers and magazines in London, including Saturday Review, for which H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were contributors. He returned to the United States during World War I and edited magazines in New York. He became an American citizen in 1921. Harris went to Germany to publish his autobiography, which contained graphic description of his claimed sexual encounters. He wrote biographies of his friends Shaw and Oscar Wilde. He established Frank Harris Publishing Company in New York to distribute his books. A collection of his works is housed at Princeton University.

Finest handmade papers in the world

In 1952, Stevens-Nelson Paper Corporation published what it called "a catalogue of the finest printing and art papers in the world." It was less boast than just a simple statement of fact. Indeed, the company had enlisted the help of small handmade paper shops across the globe.

The result was Specimens, a thick volume with deckled edges and amazing printing and artwork. Each page was a different specialty paper, varying in texture, design and thickness. The book is a remarkable find for people who love the beauty and artistry of handmade and mould-made papers and special printing techniques. A copy of Specimens is in the collection of rare and unusual book at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

George Bernard Shaw

From 1901 to 1949, Stevens-Nelson, and its predecessor, Japan Paper Company, had produced broadsides (that is, large sheets) as samples to be shown to potential customers. The sheets contained work designed by some of the best typographers and printers in America. The Specimens catalogue was an effort to expand that endeavor and to provide examples of fine printing using the papers contained in the company's repetoire. The book was intended for printers and print buyers who might handle projects that called for specialty papers.

Handmade papers are created literally by hand, or using a flat, hand-manipulated mould—a wooden frame covered with wire cloth. Mould made paper is manufactured on a small, mechanically driven, cylindrical mould. In both processes, the operator hand regulates the sheet-by-sheet manufacture. It is a slow and painstaking process, as art is often likely to be.

The process is used, the book notes in the introduction, not because it is "quaint or romantic, but simply because man has not been able to devise any other means of manufacture that will produce such superlative qualities." Indeed, mass-produced papers cannot achieve the look and feel of excellence, the strength and the quality of handmade papers.

At the time the book was produced, most of the specialty papers were produced in small mills in Europe or Japan. It is noted that one mill represented in the book was founded in 1268 "and is probably the oldest in western civilization." One French mill was founded in 1492, and one of the English mills had made currency papaer for more countires than any other mill in the world.

In addition to very beautiful papers, though, the book is a repository for amazing works of art. For here is a Picasso lithograph from the Curt Valentin Gallery in New York, an illustration of George Bernard Shaw by British expressionist painter Feliks Topolski, pen and ink illustrations of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the cover for a menu of an elegant Paris restaurant, and so much more.

Here, too, is an illustration by Italian child prodigy Romano Dazzi, heavy covers for serious reviews and public policy forums, and a simple but elegant program cover for the installation of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president of Columbia University in 1948.

The book contains a preface by Egbert Jacobson, director of the department of design at Container Corporation of America, certainly a major user of paper. Jacobson suggests that the real importance of the book lies "in its role of pacemaker for the art of printing." He contends that printers would do well to recognize the contribution artists make to the success of the art and business of printing.