Special Collections & Archives Blog

E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, one of the most beloved children’s books of the 20th century, was first published 60 years ago this month.

Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985) had a long career as a contributor and an editorial staff member at The New Yorker. He wrote poetry and novels for adults and was perhaps best known for his nonfiction essays. White had a lifelong affinity for animals and love of the natural world. He married New Yorker editor Katherine Angell in 1929 and soon after bought a farm in Maine. White’s keen observations on farm life in Charlotte’s Web and other writings were informed by his firsthand experience of life in the barnyard.

 

Title page from ZSR Library’s copy of the 1952 first edition of Charlotte’s Web

White wrote three children’s books: Stuart Little (1945), Charlotte’s Web (1952), and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970).

Ursula Nordstrom was chief editor of the children’s book division at Harper and Brothers when E.B. White submitted the manuscript for Stuart Little. White was already well known by then for his pieces in The New Yorker and other literary magazines, and Nordrstrom later recalled that

Only another children’s book editor can know the emotions one has on hearing that a famous writer of adult books is going to send a book for children to the house, for talent in the former does not always carry over to the latter. And so it was with a certain relief that I read the manuscript and found that I adored it.

Stuart Little was published in 1945 to widespread (if not universal) acclaim. Some years later White delivered another manuscript to Nordstrom:

One day in the early spring of 1952 I was sitting in my Harper office and the receptionist came in to tell me E. B. White was outside. I went out to the elevator and greeted him, and he said, “I’ve brought you a new manuscript.” I hadn’t known he was even close to finishing a second book and I was overwhelmed. Thinking immediately that it was already pretty late to get it illustrated and printed and bound in time for the fall list, I said, “Have you given me a carbon copy too, so I can rush it off to Garth [Williams]?”

“No,” he said, “this is the only copy; I didn’t make a carbon copy.” And he gave me the only copy in existence of “Charlotte’s Web,” got back on the elevator and left.

An editor seldom has the luxury of enough time in the office to read manuscripts, but I decided I would have to give myself just that luxury that afternoon. There were no Xerox machines in 1952, and I didn’t dare take a chance on losing the manuscript on the train home, or whatever. So I sat down and began to read.

By the time she finished reading, Nordstrom recalled, “I knew that this was one of the great ones.”

Dust jacket description from the first edition

Part of the enduring appeal of Charlotte’s Web is White’s loving but entirely unsentimental depiction of farm life. The idea for the book grew out of White’s experiences on his own farm, in particular his attempt to save a dying pig, which he wrote about in a 1948 essay. The talking animals in Charlotte’s Web are funny and charming, but they exist in a real world where children grow up, friends die, and animals (including humans) kill and eat other animals to survive.

White was fascinated by spiders and thoroughly researched the lives and habits of American arachnids while writing his book. At one point he brought an egg sac from the Maine farm back to the family’s Manhattan apartment. A few weeks later he was delighted to find hundreds of baby spiderlets swarming the top of his bedroom dresser. One suspects that the kindly Dr. Dorian is speaking for the author of Charlotte’s Web when he observes that

I don’t understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle.

Charlotte’s Web was a popular and critical success when it appeared in the fall of 1952. In a review in the New York Times (October 15, 1952) Eudora Welty praised White’s melding of the whimsical and the profound.

What the book is about is friendship on earth, affection and protection, adventure and miracle, life and death, trust and treachery, pleasure and pain, and the passing of time. As a piece of work it is just about perfect, and just about magical in the way it is done. What it all proves — in the words of the minister in the story which he hands down to his congregation after Charlotte writes ”Some Pig” in her web — is ”that human beings must always be on the watch for the coming of wonders.”

Interviewed by George Plimpton and Frank H. Crowther in the Paris Review (Fall 1969), White shared his thoughts on writing for children:

Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly. I handed them, against the advice of experts, a mouse-boy, and they accepted it without a quiver. In Charlotte’s Web, I gave them a literate spider, and they took that.

Some writers for children deliberately avoid using words they think a child doesn’t know. This emasculates the prose and, I suspect, bores the reader. Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention. I’m lucky again: my own vocabulary is small, compared to most writers, and I tend to use the short words. So it’s no problem for me to write for children. We have a lot in common.

The first edition of Charlotte’s Web featured 46 illustrations by Garth Williams. Williams had also illustrated White’s first children’s book Stuart Little. An aspiring but unsuccessful New Yorker cartoonist at the time, Williams had been offered the Stuart Little assignment by Ursula Nordstrom after several other illustrators turned it down. But Williams’s precise line drawings proved a good match for E. B. White’s prose, and he was Nordstrom’s immediate choice for Charlotte’s Web. Williams went on to illustrate nearly 100 children’s books, including titles by Margaret Wise Brown, Charlotte Zolotow, George Selden, and the 1960s reissue of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s complete Little House series.

Williams is said to have used his oldest daughter, Fiona, as the model for Fern Arable.

ZSR Library’s first edition of Charlotte’s Web is one of many E. B. White titles from the Lynwood Giacomini collection of 20th century American literature. The Giacomini collection was purchased by the library in 1976.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold…

John Keats, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer”

The book that inspired Keats’s famous sonnet, George Chapman’s The Whole Works of Homer,  is one of the volumes included in the Z. Smith Reynolds Library Special Collections fall 2012 exhibit.  On view August 2012 through February 2013, Faithfully English’d: Classical Literature in Translation features Greek and Latin classics in English translations from the 14^th through 20^th centuries. All of the books are from the ZSR Rare Books Collection.

The exhibit includes translations by Geoffrey Chaucer, George Sandys, John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound, Allen Mandelbaum, and many others.  The books themselves, published from the 16^th through 20^th centuries, are as varied as the texts they convey. From large, lavishly illustrated folios to cheaply bound schoolbooks, the different physical manifestations attest to the diverse readership of classical translations.

The five centuries’ worth of books on view are a testament to the enduring fascination that English-speaking authors and readers have for the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. But the texts also show how styles and theories of translation have changed over the centuries. George Chapman, a contemporary of Shakespeare, was the first author to attempt to render both the Iliad and Odyssey into English verse. Chapman’s extravagant Elizabethan style contrasts with the carefully crafted heroic couplets of Alexander Pope’s 1715 Iliad. William Morris’s Odyssey (1887), inspired by Anglo-Saxon poetry, proves interesting if not particularly readable. And annotated typescript draft pages of Allen Mandelbaum’s 1990 Odyssey show the painstaking process of translating Homer’s verse into modern English poetry.

Interest in Homer’s epics has scarcely flagged for the past 500 years, but some classical authors seem to resonate more strongly in certain periods. Aesop’s fables, for example, are now largely regarded as children’s fare. But in Roger L’Estrange’s 1692 translation they are the basis for pointed political satire. The Roman poet Ovid, widely read from medieval times through the 18^th century, is the subject of many translations and adaptations, from Chaucer’s Legends of Good Women (on view here in a 1515 edition) to Mandelbaum’s 1993 translation of the Metamorphoses.

Throughout the past five centuries translations have provided access to classical texts for those who cannot read the original Greek and Latin. From the Renaissance through the 19^th century, anyone who wanted to participate in the literary culture and intellectual discourse of England needed to be familiar with the classics. But fluency in Latin, and even more so in Greek, required an elite education difficult for anyone but the sons of wealthy families to attain. John Keats, the son of a London stable-master, experienced Homer through Chapman’s verses. William Shakespeare, whose merchant-class origins left him with “small Latin and less Greek,” used Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives as the basis for Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. And Aphra Behn , in a dedicatory verse for Thomas Creech’s translation of Lucretius (1638), praised the translator while lamenting the fact that women were denied a classical education:

The Godlike Virgil and Great Homer’s Muse
Like Divine Mysteries are conceal’d from us….
But… Thou by this Translation dost advance
Our Knowledge from the state of Ignorance;
And Equall’st Us to Man!

The best translations in every era combine thorough scholarship with literary sensibility and a profound appreciation of the original texts. Pope, Dryden, and others preface their works with discussions of how best to render Greek and Latin texts into English. Most counsel a middle ground between literal translation and loose paraphrase. Pope famously observes in his introduction to the Iliad that

It is the first grand duty of an interpreter to give his author entire and unmaimed; and for the rest, the diction and versification only are his proper province, since these must be his own, but the others he is to take as he finds them.

Other authors have adapted Greek and Latin texts to create entirely new works of literature. From Chaucer to James Joyce, whose Ulysses is on exhibit here, countless English authors have taken inspiration from the classics.

The ZSR Special Collections exhibit is one of several fall 2012 events celebrating classical translations and adaptations. Other events include the Reynolda House special exhibit Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey, a celebration of the life of Allen Mandelbaum, and an appearance by children’s author Rick Riordan.

Faithfully English’d: Classical Literature in Translation  is on exhibit in the Special Collections and Archives Reading Room on the 6^th floor of the Reynolds Wing. For more information contact Megan Mulder at 758-5091.

Special Collections and Archives is pleased to announce the completion of the Wayne E. Oates papers. Thanks to the hard work of Cindy Good and Sarah Appleby, this 14 linear foot collection has been arranged and described, and the finding aid can be seen here. This collection contains the professional and personal papers, sermons, correspondence, and works from other authors compiled by Wayne Oates. Professional papers include lectures, outlines, presentations, bibliographies, research notes, and manuscripts of articles relating to the field of pastoral care and counseling.

ABOUT WAYNE OATES

Wayne Oates (1917-1999) produced an extensive, pioneering body of work and research in the field of pastoral care and counseling. Oates developed the “trialogue” form of pastoral counseling, described as a conversation between the person being counseled, the counselor, and the Holy Spirit. He is also responsible for coining the term “workaholic”.

Born into a rural community of Greenville, SC, Wayne Oates grew up in poverty. Abandoned by his father, he began working alongside his mother at the cotton mills at a young age. At 14, he was recognized as exceptional and chosen to serve as a page in the United States Senate. He would go on to pursue much more education; he was a graduate of Mars Hill Junior College and Wake Forest University, and received his Ph.D. in Psychology of Religion from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He served as a pastor in churches in North Carolina and Kentucky.

In 1974, Oates joined the faculty at the University of Louisville Medical School. Combining his knowledge of theology and behavioral science, his role at the school helped medical students learn how to incorporate the spiritual needs of their patients in a clinical setting. Noted for his great compassion and ability to empathize, Wayne Oates mentored and encouraged numerous people in healing positions. In 1984 the American Psychiatric Association honored him with the Oskar Pfister Award for his contributions to the relationship between religion and psychiatry.

He and his wife, Pauline, were residents of Louisville, KY until his death in 1999.

 

 

The Fries Woolen Mill Diary is story within a story. Two men are responsible for this one folder “collection” being a part of the WFU archives, Francis Levin Fries and Wallace Barger Goebel. Separated by almost one hundred years, Fries was instrumental in the creation of the original diary and Goebel is responsible for the copy within our collection. The diary is a wealth of information about Salem as a mill and textile town.

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[The following is transcribed from what we believe is Goebel's narrative and research on Fries and the diary]

Francis Levin Fries was born October 17, 1812, in Salem, NC. He was the eldest child of John Christian William Fries and Johanna Elizabeth, maiden name Nissen. He was educated in the boys’ school of Salem, and then at Nazareth Hall, in Nazareth, PA. In 1836 the Salem Cotton Manufacturing Company was organized in Salem, and Mr. Fries was employed as its Agent. Though without and previous experience whatever, he went North, studied cotton mill machinery, bought what was needed, shipped it to Salem, installed it, and ran the mill for nearly four years.

In the fall of 1839 Francis Fries began to make plans for a small wool-mill, to be conducted on his own account. Fortunately for the historian, it was then still the rule in Salme that the new enterprises must have the approval of the Aufseher Cellegium, and therefore the Minutes of that Board, furnish interesting information concerning the preliminaries. On Oct. 25, 1839, the Minutes of the Collegium recorded that Francis Fries and his father, William Fries, were planning to build a small woolen mill on a  lot back of William Fries’s home-place, that is on the west side of what is now South Liberty (then Salt) street. Members of the Collegium were favorably inclined, but a few days later the neighbors entered a protest, basing it on their fear of the smoke from the steam-engine, and because he planned to use slave labor in the mill. On Nov. 21st the Collegium had a conference with Mr. Fries, in which these objections were freely discussed. Fries agreed to build his factory on an out-lot at the corner of the new Shallowford Street and Salt Street, thereby removing the smoke from the center of town. There was a rule in Salem dating from the action of the Congregation Council in February, 1820, that no slave might be taught a “trade or profession” that is a handicraft of any kind, no matter whether the slave belonged to the ma teaching him or was hired from another. This applied only to the residents in the town of Salem, and from the wording of the resolution was evidently intended to prevent competition with the white artisans of the community. In the conference with Fries in 1839, the Collegium concluded that it would not be teaching a slave a trade to let him run a machine, and therefore would not establish a dangerous precedent. It was noted that Fries did not expect to establish a large factory, because not a great deal of suitable wool was raised in the State, so not many slaves would be employed there, and he promised to give bond that if the slaves made trouble, he would send them away, and if in the course of years the factory became a nuisance he would give it up. The Collegium met again on the following day and decided that as the weaving would be done on William Fries’ farm, outside the town, the men running the machines would rate a “day laborers”, and so no precedent would be established.

The lease system still prevailed in Salem, and on Feb. 3, 1840, a Lease was signed,  giving Fries possession of a lot on the north-west corner of what are now Brookstown Avenue and South Liberty Street. As the factory developed this lot proved to be too small, and adjacent land was added several times.

From the beginning Mr. Fries was assisted in the wool mill by his younger brother Henry w. Fries, who became a partner in the business in March, 1846. Among the papers of the firm of F. & H. Fries there is a small mill diary, beginning abruptly on April 13, 1840 and setting forth the details of what was virtually a pioneer enterprise. It presents a vivid picture of the industry, tireless energy, and versatility of the owner; and of his treatment of his slaves, his “boys”, of whom he expected readiness to follow his lead in work, but for who he would close the mill when the weather was right for a rabbit hunt, or when a circus was in town.

During the Civil War the Fries Mill was run for the government, making the “Confederate Gray” cloth used for the soldiers. When the war opened, Mr. Fries was in poor health, and died in August, 1863. His brother ran the mill until the sons of Mr. Fries grew to maturity, the name continued unchanged. Henry W. Fries never married, and remained head of the firm until his death in November, 1902, at the age of seventy seven.

After the Civil War, Henry W. Fries helped a number of the slaves formerly belonging to the family to buy homes of their own. Some remained in the employ of the firm, or individual members thereof, until death, although in the wool mill they were largely replaced by white labor.

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The original Fries Woolen Mill Diary is part of the Francis Levin Fries Papers, 1850-1925 held in the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Wallace Barger Goebel graduated from Wake Forest in 1925 and published A History of Manufactures in North Carolina Before 1860 in 1926, the same years handwritten on the title page of his transcribed diary. It can be deduced that the transcription and accompanying summarized biographical and historical note at the beginning of WFU’s copy of the diary was part of Goebel’s book research.

Described as the “Lady’s Man” in the Howler’s Prophecy for the Class of 1925, Goebel became an author, a professor of history and political science, and an archivist at the U.S. National Archives and Records Service. Although Goebel’s papers were acquired by the Archives in 1988, it is believed that the Fries Woolen Mill Diary (MS39) has been in the collection since the late 1920′s. Goebel has made a lasting impression on Wake Forest. He not only provided the Archives with this account of Winston-Salem history and his own personal papers, he also has a scholarship fund established in his name here at Wake Forest. The Wallace Barger Goebel Scholarship is based on ability and need, with first preference to a student interested in literature, second preference to a student interested in history, and third preference to a student enrolled in the premedical program.

 

Jack Butler Yeats (1871-1957) is considered by many to be the most important Irish artist of the 20th century. Like his brother, the poet William Butler Yeats , Jack Yeats was a key figure in the Celtic Revival movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Jack Yeats is best known for his long and prolific career in the visual arts, but he also wrote novels, essays, and plays.  A profound attachment to the land and people of Ireland is evident in all of his work.

1912 first edition of Life in the West of Ireland

Jack was the youngest child of Irish artist John Butler Yeats and his wife Susan Pollexfen. The Yeats family were Anglo-Irish Protestants from County Sligo, Ireland, but Jack Yeats was born in London, where his father had moved the family after giving up a law practice to pursue his artistic ambitions. John Yeats had some success as a portrait artist, but the family suffered chronic financial difficulties. When Jack was eight years old he was sent to live with his maternal grandparents in Sligo on the northwest coast of Ireland, where he remained for the next eleven years. When he returned to London in 1887, Jack entered art school and began his career as a professional artist and illustrator.

Frontispiece illustration for Life in the West of Ireland

Jack began his career as an illustrator and cartoonist for popular English magazines and newspapers. He also provided artwork for cards and publications of his sister Elizabeth Yeats’s Cuala Press. In 1910 Jack and his wife moved back to Ireland and settled there permanently.

Jack Yeats once remarked to Thomas MacGreevy that “No one creates… the artist assembles memories.” Yeats’s memories of the Sligo of his childhood are the subject of Life in the West of Ireland, a volume of line drawings, watercolors, and reproductions of oil paintings  published in 1912.

Z. Smith Reynolds Library Special Collections holds two copies of the first edition of Life in the West of Ireland. One is a presentation copy from Jack Yeats to Augusta, Lady Gregory.

Inscription by Jack Yeats

Lady Gregory was a folklorist, playwright, and monumental figure in the Irish Literary Renaissance. She advised and encouraged many of the most important Irish writers and artists of the time, including both William and Jack Yeats.  Jack sent her a copy of Life in the West of Ireland in December 1912 as she was embarking on a tour of the United States.

Manuscript note from Jack Yeats laid into the ZSR copy of Life in the West of Ireland

Life in the West of Ireland is an affectionate but unsentimental portrait of a way of life that was disappearing in the early 20th century. Yeats’s illustrations document the everyday life of inhabitants of towns like Sligo.

From an early age Jack Yeats had an interest in theater and spectacle. Many of the illustrations in Life in the West of Ireland depict popular entertainments– circuses, fairs, and stage melodramas.

Later in his career Jack Yeats turned more to oil painting. Several of his paintings are reproduced as black and white plates in Life in the West of Ireland.

The first edition of Life in the West of Ireland included 150 copies of a special limited edition.

Limited edition (left) and regular first edition (right), both published by Maunsel & Co.

ZSR Special Collections holds copy 30 of the limited edition, with an original color sketch of a circus clown.

Sketch by Jack Yeats for the limited edition of Life in the West of Ireland

Wake Forest’s copies of the inscribed first edition and the limited edition were purchased by the library in 1972 and 1974 respectively. They are part of the extensive collection of Irish Literary Renaissance materials in ZSR Library’s Special Collections. This collection includes most of Jack Yeats’s published works, along with near-complete collections of the works of W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and many other important Irish writers. ZSR Special Collections also holds the archives of Liam Miller and his Dolmen Press, which was the successor to the Cuala Press and publisher of many important works of Irish literature in the second half of the 20th century.

Special Collections and Archives is pleased to announce that the first segment of the Henlee H. Barnette papers finding aid is now online! The correspondence series of the Barnette papers fills 27 boxes, and spans the years 1943-1996. It gives great insight to Dr. Barnette’s life while he was a student, father, minister, professor, and social activist. Some correspondents of note include Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Olin Binkley, John Claypool, John Howard Griffin, Elton Trueblood and Millard Fuller.

Henlee Hulix Barnette was a 1940 graduate of Wake Forest College who became a professor, Baptist minister, and outspoken advocate for social change. One of the most progressive Baptists of his time, Barnette worked to advance the civil rights movement, spoke out adamantly against the Vietnam war, and spent some of his early years of ministry in one of the most dangerous areas of inner-city Louisville, living in and serving the people of the Haymarket neighborhood.

Vicki and Rebecca will continue to process the other parts of the collection, and announcements will be made when new series have been added to the finding aid. This is such a rich collection of materials that researchers will find great insight and information in this first section of correspondence, as well as additional series that are to come.

See the finding aid here: Henlee Barnette Papers (MS 474)

Special Collections and and Archives is thrilled to announce that the Clarence Herbert New and Robert Warrington New papers have been processed! You are able to access the finding aid online and explore the extensive and varied collecting habits of both Clarence and his son Robert. The Clarence Herbert New collection of Theater actor cabinet cards is a large portion of the digital project  Theater Actor Prints and Photograph Collection. In addition to cabinet photographs, C.H. and Robert New collectively contributed over 120 boxes (over 100 linear feet) of materials consisting of manuscripts, film posters, travel photographs, maps, scrapbooks, research materials, correspondence, art, and prints. It is well worth taking a look at the finding aid to simply read the biographical note on C.H. New. He led a very interesting life that included around the world travel, shipwrecks, and losing his arm to a bear in a New York City zoo! Not to mention his fame as the writer of “Diplomatic Free Lance,” which some critics have called the longest novel ever written. This is a tremendously interesting collection and we hope that researchers find the New’s appreciation for collecting and asset to their research.

 

Two hundred years ago this month, the War of 1812 began. This three-year conflict with Britain was, as one recent commentator observed, “the Jan Brady of American conflicts for good reason: not only was it book-ended by two vastly more significant wars, but its causes weren’t sexy, its conclusions were muddy, and its most famous battle took place after peace was declared.”

But one thing historians agree on is that the War of 1812 was instrumental in forging a national identity for the still-new United States. Public enthusiasm for the music and poetry of the war persisted long after ratification of the Treaty of Ghent ended the conflict in 1815. So when Richmond bookseller and publisher Peter Cottom brought out a second edition of his popular American Star songster in 1817, the small volume, subtitled A Choice Collection of the Most Approved Patriotic & Other Songs, contained a large number of songs celebrating American victories in the recent war.

The most famous of these is found on page 4

Francis Scott Key wrote the text of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in September 1814 while witnessing the British attack on Baltimore’s Fort McHenry. Shortly thereafter it was published as a broadside, set to the music of the popular tune “To Anacreon in Heaven“. The 1817 edition of The American Star is one of the earliest appearances of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in a collection of songs.

Many lesser-known songs from the War of 1812 are included in The American Star. Several of them, like the “Song” pictured above, are set to the same tune as Key’s lyrics.

Over half of the songs in the volume have nationalistic themes. Some celebrate specific battles or war heroes:

General William Hull is actually best known for his embarrassing surrender of Detroit to the British in August 1812.

The British navy’s unprovoked attack on the USS Chesapeake in 1807 was one of the events that led the U.S. to declare war.

The battle of Lake Erie, fought in September 1813, was one of the largest naval engagements of the war and an important victory for the U.S.

 

U.S. forces led by Andrew Jackson defended the newly acquired Louisiana territory from a British invasion in the battle of New Orleans, the last major battle of the war.

Other songs in the collection are more generally patriotic. This one, by poet Samuel Woodworth, celebrates the role of the printing press in a democratic society:

The rest of the songs are largely popular ballads of the time, many from the musical theater. The subtitle of one called “Nobody Coming to Marry Me” asserts that it was “sang [sic.] by Mrs. Poe, with unbounded applause, at the New-York Theatre.”

Mrs. Poe was the young actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe. Deserted by her husband, she attempted to support her three small children by a career onstage before her very early death. Her second son, Edgar, became one of the most important American authors of the 19th century.

ZSR Library’s copy of The American Star was donated to the Wake Forest College Library sometime in the 19th century. It remained in the circulating collection until 2011.  The book has been heavily used and inexpertly repaired, and it is missing its title page.

Even as a new book, the small volume would not have been visually impressive. The second edition of The American Star was printed on poor quality paper and cheaply bound, an inexpensive book intended for a wide audience. Its publisher, Peter Cottom, traded mostly in almanacs, practical handbooks, and a few legal documents (he is known to have supplied Thomas Jefferson with reading material). The American Star was popular entertainment for citizens of the still evolving United States. It may not be pretty, but it is a valuable artifact from the nation’s formative years.

Special Collections and Archives is pleased to announce the online publication of two new finding aids! The Bill Leonard Papers and the Wake Forest UniversitySchool of Divinity Collection have been processed and the findings aids are available online. These two new additions, as with the rest of our published finding aids, can be found at our Special Collections webpage. Researchers both on campus and off are encouraged to browse our collections online and make an appointment to access the materials.

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a man of many talents and many interests, but he is best known as the creator of the world’s most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes.

Conan Doyle published his first story in 1879, while he was a medical student at the University of Edinburgh. After completing his studies, Conan Doyle made repeated attempts to establish a medical practice. He was not a great success as a doctor, which had the benefit of giving him plenty of spare time to continue his writing career. By 1891 he had given up medicine entirely and was supporting his family (a wife and two small children) solely by his writing.

Detective fiction was a fairly new genre when Sherlock Holmes made his first appearance in “A Study in Scarlet,” published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887. A second Holmes story, “The Sign of the Four,” appeared in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890. Both stories were also published as individual volumes.

But it was the July 1891 publication of “A Scandal in Bohemia” in The Strand magazine that made Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle household names.

The Strand, a new venture from publisher and entrepreneur George Newnes, was a popular magazine aimed at a middle-class family readership. Its issues included a variety of fiction and nonfiction pieces.

Conan Doyle observed that the “disconnected stories” common in magazines of the time did not particularly inspire reader loyalty. But an ongoing serial story presented problems of its own: readers who missed one issue might lose the plot and become uninterested. Conan Doyle posited that

Clearly the ideal compromise was a character which carried through, and yet instalments [sic.] which were each complete in themselves, so that the purchaser was always sure that he could relish the whole contents of the magazine. I believe that I was the first to realize this, and “The Strand Magazine” the first to put it into practice. . . . Looking round for my central character I felt that Sherlock Holmes, whom I had already handled in two little books, would easily lend himself to a succession of short stories. [Memories and Adventures, 90]

Strand editor Greenhough Smith agreed, and he requested a series of six Sherlock Holmes stories. They were hugely popular and were a major factor in the new magazine’s becoming highly successful. The stories were published in The Strand between July 1891 and June 1892. Immediately thereafter they were reprinted as a separate volume entitled The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

The book was a large volume, bound in bright blue with prominent gold lettering and an illustration that was a facsimile of a Strand Magazine cover. It was clearly intended to catch the eye of a potential buyer scanning a bookseller’s stalls, and to reinforce the connection with the magazine.

The book version included the illustrations created by Sidney Paget for the magazine installments. Conan Doyle approved of the illustrations, although he initially thought that Paget had made Sherlock Holmes a bit too handsome. It was Paget who created the now-iconic image of Holmes in his long coat and deerstalker hat.

The publication of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes established Conan Doyle as an author of note. In an interview in The Bookman (May 1892) he was asked “how on earth he had evolved, apparently out of his inner consciousness, such an extraordinary person as his detective Sherlock Holmes.” Conan Doyle replied that

[I]f you please, he is not evolved out of any one’s inner consciousness. Sherlock Holmes is the literary embodiment. . . of my memory of a professor of medicine at Edinburgh University [Dr. Joesph Bell], who would sit in the patients’ waiting-room. . . and diagnose the people as they came in, before they had even opened their mouths. He would tell them their symptoms, he would give them details of their lives, and he would hardly ever make a mistake. ["A Talk with Dr. Conan Doyle", 50]

Dr. Bell himself, the model for Sherlock Holmes, reviewed The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for The Bookman (December 1892). Bell praised Conan Doyle’s skill as an author and confirmed the link between the diagnostician and the detective:

The precise and intelligent recognition and appreciation of minor differences is the real essential factor in all successful medical diagnosis. Carried into ordinary life, granted the presence of an insatiable curiosity and fairly acute senses, you have Sherlock Holmes as he astonishes his somewhat dense friend Watson; carried out in a specialised training, you have Sherlock Holmes the skilled detective. [79]

Bell also noted that the stories had been collected in a “handsome volume,” but he observed that “Had the handsome volume been divided into two, it would not have been so heavy to hold.” [81]

Bell was not the only reviewer to remark on the physical appearance of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. A less sympathetic writer for the National Observer and British Review (29 October 1892) published an “interview” with Sherlock Holmes himself, in which the fictional detective is highly critical of his creator. Conan Doyle in this account is a money-grubbing hack, “a man of few scruples. . . striving, like all his class, to make ‘copy’ where he can.” And Holmes deduces this from looking at a copy of The Adventures:

You see this book is large and expensively brought out; moreover it is issued by a publisher who caters for the million. Hence it is clear that a very large sale is anticipated. Why? Because the book is supposed to contain a popular element, and that popular element is myself. Now, it follows that Dr. Doyle must have heard of me, through Watson or the police; that he saw I should suit his game (which was money); and having invented spurious stories about me that he hit upon a publisher similarly unscrupulous. [606-607]

The huge popularity of the Sherlock Holmes books provoked something of a backlash from critics like the one from the National Observer. The late 19th century saw a deluge of books and magazines like The Strand which were aimed at a middle and working-class readership who had more leisure time and disposable income than previous generations. The literary elite was alarmed by this incursion of commerce into the realm of art. And Arthur Conan Doyle himself was not immune to this view. Although he was entirely unapologetic about writing for a popular audience, he also had no illusions about the Sherlock Holmes stories being taken seriously as literature. Conan Doyle was far more invested in his works of historical fiction (and later nonfiction histories), telling his Bookman interviewer “That is the only work I really fancy.”

After the great success of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle wrote a second series of Holmes stories for The Strand. Twelve stories appeared between December 1892 and December 1893. The were collected into a volume called The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, published in January 1894.

Conan Doyle intended this to be Sherlock Holmes’s last outing. In the last story, “The Final Problem,” Holmes and his arch-nemesis James Moriarty plunge to their apparent deaths over the Reichenbach Falls (Conan Doyle got the idea during a family holiday in the Alps).

Sherlock Holmes fans were outraged. “They say that a man is never properly appreciated until he is dead,” Conan Doyle later observed, “and the general protest against my summary execution of Holmes taught me how many and how numerous were his friends.” [Memories and Adventures, 94]

Conan Doyle eventually relented, publishing “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (which supposedly took place before Holmes’s death) in 1901, and finally bringing Holmes back to life (apparently he had faked his fatal plunge over the falls) in 1903. Conan Doyle published more than 30 additional Sherlock Holmes stories before his own death in 1930.

Over a century later, Sherlock Holmes is still the most famous detective in the world. The audience for the original stories and for new adaptations is as enthusiastic today as it was in the 19th century. It would appear that Sherlock Holmes really is immortal.

The Z. Smith Reynolds Library Special Collections copies of the first editions of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes are from the library of Charles Babcock.