Description
Harry C. Phibbs (privately printed), Published 1936. Wraps, staple bound, 46 pp.; 23 cm; illustrated throughout with black-and-white photographic plates by the author (each signed in plate "H. C. Phibbs").
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
112
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Very Good condition. Pale rust colored paper covers (softer than card stock) with light bumping and creasing to edges and corners and mild shelf-wear. Binding tight. Previous owner's contemporary signature in ink with the inscription "Christmas, 1936" on the front free endpaper; consistent with the book's role as a friendship gift. Otherwise pages clean and unmarked.An annual Christmas keepsake privately printed and distributed by Harry C. Phibbs (1879-1968), the Dublin-born Chicago advertising executive who in 1921 founded the Harry C. Phibbs Advertising Co., recognized as the first pharmaceutical advertising agency built on a "scientific" model insisting that medical claims be supported by clinical evidence (Phibbs was inducted into the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame in 2000). Before emigrating from Ireland, Phibbs was part of the Dublin literary circle around James Joyce and W. B. Yeats and a member of the Abbey Theatre group; he was also a serious amateur photographer active in the Chicago Camera Club, the Businessmen's Art Club, and the Adventurers' Club of Chicago, and served as a house photographer for the Goodman Theatre. The "Hodge Podge" volumes (documented examples from this and subsequent years include 1937, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, and 1952) collected Phibbs's own essays alongside his own pictorial photographs, sent each December to friends and clients. The text in this 1936 issue opens "Well, here it is again, Christmas, and an opportunity to send my friends some of the odd and interesting bits which for me have added spice to the Old Year," indicating that the series had begun at least a year earlier. The essays in this volume range over Madison Avenue and the Italian-Romanesque architecture of St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Ohio River and frontier mythology of the Kentucky and Indiana borderlands, vaudeville's amateur-night circuit and the rise of Major Bowes, the colonial Mohawk Valley and the York State Militia, the Manhattan newspaper society pages and a glancing reference to Edna St. Vincent Millay, the Texas Rangers and the Chisholm Trail, and a closing meditation on American religious tolerance and immigration. Each essay faces a full-page photographic plate by Phibbs; titles seen include Jupiter (a swan in reflected water), Tense and Monday (a New York street scene with American flag), On the Shore, Old Man of Harley Street, Green Branches, The Cathedral, Tropic Sunrise, and Prayer.