#scribner's

Scribner’s for September. John Edwin Jackson (American, 1876-1950). Poster.

Hemingway famously hated the covers of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms and I am not much of a fan either. The jackets, designed by Cleonike Damianakes Wilkins for Scribner's, embody Art Deco styling of their time, 1926 and 1929 respectively, and feature vaguely Pre-Raphaelite figures in repose, some clad in togas, some not.

The covers feel like an attempt to soften the prose that they cover, to give them dignity and to ornament the modern, short, declarative sentences inside. They're odd, yes, but what surprises me as a new bookstore owner, fiction buyer, and designer, these Hemingway designs are exactly the same as the designs on the editions available today.

What was wrong then is more wrong now. Though I searched for alternate editions to sell, none were available. I did find a lovely design by Paul Sahre of Old Man and The Sea and a new Vintage Classics edition of In Our Time which was redesigned and reissued when the book came out of copyright.

Illustrations by Franklin Booth for “Glimpses of Munich Life” by Rene Reinicke

published in Scribner’s Magazine, April 1908

pen and ink 

Here is a literary anecdote to divert your bed of illness. It seems that Hemingway’s novel [A Farewell to Arms], in its serial form, had to be expurgated for the readers of Scribner’s Magazine. And when Maxwell Perkins came to go through the manuscript, he found three words which he was doubtful about printing even in the book. The words were balls, shit, and cocksucker. So he had a solemn conference on the subject with old Mr. Charles Scribner. The first two words were discussed, and it was decided to suppress them, but when Perkins came to the third—which he thought Mr. Scribner had probably never heard—he couldn’t get it out, and wrote it down on a piece of paper. Old Mr. Scribner put on his pince-nez and considered it with serious attention—then said, “Perkins, do you think Hemingway would respect you, if he knew you were unable to say that word, but had to write it out?” Perkins was so flustered by the incident that he forgot and left the memorandum pad with cocksucker on it on a bracket in his office, where it was just on the level of the eyes of anybody who came in. He didn’t discover it until just before he left in the afternoon—by which time it had thrown the whole Scribner’s office into a state of acute embarrassment, deep mental and moral distress, and troubling mystification.

For my birthday, my husband found the most amazing gift. He found the original frontispiece to Scribner’s August 1910 issue in a heap of old prints at a local antique shop. The frontispiece is pretty rare and very few reproductions have ever been done. It’s a drawing by none other than Maxfield Parrish for the poem by George T. Marsh titled, The Errant Pan. What’s more, Maxfield Parrish used himself as the model. He took a picture of himself with a string tied to the camera shutter. Yes, that is actually him sitting there all regal playing the pipes. The print is in pristine shape. 

That is my print. Below is the image as it appeared in Scribner’s opposite George T. Marsh’s poem. 

Here is the issue in PDF of that year. http://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1257343852187500.pdf