"Young Man's Literature"

Most library exhibitions are the englassed sort which chiefly interest bibliophiles--rare first editions, original manuscripts, fine bindings, and such. Of a different sort is an exhibition now showing at Chicago's Newberry Library.

Consisting of 218 books, 25 posters, 17 issues of a literary magazine called The Chap-Book, it includes most of the works published between 1893 and 1905 by the late great Chicago publishing house of Stone & Kimball (later Herbert S. Stone & Co.).* To a generation that looks to the East for intelligent publishing, the story of this output is provocative.

A Harvard dormitory was Stone & Kimball's first office. Herbert Stuart Stone, described as a "martinet" in appearance, an "exquisite" in taste, was the son of the founder-editor of the Chicago Daily News.

Hannibal Ingalls Kimball Jr., a shrewd, dynamic businessman, was the son of a Yankee-born Atlanta capitalist. In their junior year, they published a 5-c- guide to the Chicago World's Fair, written and illustrated by Stone. It netted $600. Before graduation they had published books by Hamlin Garland, Eugene Field, Joaquin Miller George Santayana. In 1894 they moved to Chicago. Their house organ was a little magazine called The Chap-Book dedicated to "all that is most modern and aggressive in the Young Man's literature." Within the next few years they had introduced to U. S. readers such little known or unknown writers as W. B. Yeats, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Anatole France, H. G. Wells, Max Beerbohm, Symbolist Poets Verlaine, Mallarme, Rimbaud, as well as the poetry of Stephen Crane, the fiction of Henry James. They published one of the first (and still classic) examples of the new realism, Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware. Their designers were (and still are) the best in the country: Bruce Rogers, Updike, Goudy. A little heard-of French painter named Toulouse-Lautrec made an advertising poster for them. The Chap-Book started the vogue of Little Magazines (then called Dinkey Magazines), germinated the Chicago literary "renaissance of a few years hence. Meanwhile in Manhattan, old-line publishers were glooming because there were no new writers to replace the big names rapidly dying off: Ruskin, Tennyson, Carlyle, Emerson, etc. Kimball bought Stone's share in 1896, headed for Manhattan, made the only attempt to publish a U. S. literary daily (the editors burned out in a fortnight), soon fizzled out as a general publisher. He ended as an authority on industrial pension plans, inventor of World War I's "baby bonds."

In Chicago, meanwhile, Stone set up a firm of his own which was as brilliant commercially as the old partnership had been artistically. In 1900 he got a best seller, George Ade's More Fables in Slang. Next year he got another in George Barr McCutcheon's Graustark. Year following came the sensational Story of Mary MacLane. Then Publisher Stone decided to cut corners, pay less attention to experimental writers, add cheap reprints, and he published a magazine called The House Beautiful. (The Chap-Book had folded in the Spanish-American War.) Four years later with "nothing of importance coming out," Publisher Stone sold his tottering business to a now-extinct Manhattan publisher.

After 40 years Stone & Kimball and

Herbert S. Stone rank as one of the most eloquent examples of U. S. publishers gone right--and then wrong. They also still rank as one of the best arguments that U. S. literature would be healthier, more varied and more exciting if a few more talented amateur publishers should appear to decentralize the congested Manhattan publishing business.

*Excellently recalled in Sidney Kramer's forth coming history of the firms (Normandie House, Chicago, $10).

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