Title: 
Bradley, His Book

Date of Publication: 
May 1896 – Aug. 1896; Nov. 1896 – Jan. 1897

Place(s) of Publication: 
Springfield, Massachusetts

Frequency of Publication: 
Monthly, suspended September and October of 1896.

Circulation: 
25,000 copies

Publisher: 
The Wayside Press

Physical Description:
5 1/8″ X 10 1/4″

Price: 
10 cents per issue (first two issues)
25 cents per issue (last five issues

Editor(s): 
William H. Bradley

Associate Editor(s): 
None

Libraries with Original Issues:
Occidental College, Middlebury College, Davidson College, The University of Kansas, and searchable PDFs of full collection through JSTOR

Reprint Editions: 
None. Various libraries hold re-prints of the commercial designs from Bradley’s magazines including the New York Public Library and Columbia University Libraries

In 1896 William H. Bradley, in his late twenties, began publishing Bradley, His Book out of the Wayside Press in Springfield, Massachusetts. He published literature and artwork produced by his peers (including Audrey Beardsley and William Morris), as well as several up-and-coming authors of his generation such as Percival Pollard, Maxfield Parrish, and Margaret Christine Whiting. The magazine emphasized art criticism, artist biographies, and arts and crafts techniques. Bradley, His Book also featured poetry and short stories from authors like Harriet Monroe and George W. Cable. Special editions of the magazine, like the July 1896 “Women’s Issue” and the December 1896 Christmas issue, highlighted experimentation in typeface and content. The magazine prioritized quality of visual design over literary quality.

The tall, narrow format of this little magazine mirrors the artwork that Bradley intended to sell. He designed posters and print works that were available for purchase through the Wayside Press. At the back of the magazine, Bradley inserted advertisements for other magazines, journals, or household items. The most common advertisements were for fine paper companies and printing. Many of these advertisements were printed on samples of the paper these companies intended to sell. Bradley designed many of these advertisements himself, resulting in an aesthetically pleasing, diverse, and effective advertising strategy. One could say these were the precursor to the “advertorial” found in almost every magazine today, luring the reader in with an appealing illustration attached to a well-worded advertising hook.

Though only seven issues were published, the quality of the artwork in its short run exemplifies a unique combination of the Art Nouveau style and the Arts and Crafts movement of the 1890s. As editor, printer, contributor, and owner of the magazine, Bradley was often overworked yet refused to pass on responsibilities to his employees. His inability to dole out tasks to others and bouts of sickness led to the magazine’s irregular publication from August 1896 to November of that year. Along with the magazine’s profits, Bradley’s health declined. He eventually sold Wayside Press in February 1897 resulting in the cancellation of the magazine.

Although Bradley, His Book never issued an explicit manifesto, the editor, William H. Bradley stipulated what art and advertising would do in the magazine in this prospectus piece:

William H. Bradley (Jul. 10, 1868 – Jan. 25, 1962)
Editor: May 1896 – Jan. 1897

William H. Bradley was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, Aaron Bradley, was a cartoonist for a local newspaper and “provided Will with his first exposure to the world of printing and the motivation to be an artist” (Bambace xiii). His mother, Sarah, was a seamstress. At the age of six, Bradley purchased a small printing press from an advertisement in Youth’s Companion for $3.50. He used this printing press to print cards for his friends. His parents recognized William’s artistic talents but art schooling was beyond his “family’s finances” (xiii). Instead, his father encouraged him to “learn wood engraving by working as an apprentice at a printing or publishing company” (xiii). When his father died in 1880, William and his mother moved to Michigan. He began his apprenticeship education in 1882 where he operated the printing press for a local newspaper and “designed and hung posters for local business concerns,” on the side (xiii). He also experimented with typefaces and print layout. Chicago printing firms began noticing his designs, and he moved there in 1888 to work for the Knight & Leonard printing firm. Throughout the 1890s, he established his own, small design studio while working for commercial enterprises as well as his own artistic ventures.

Heavily influenced by Art Nouveau style, especially by Audrey Beardsley’s work, William H. Bradley’s characteristic, colorful style was the product of these late-1900s aesthetics combined with a resurrection of colonial and medieval type fonts. Throughout his career Bradley designed hundreds of layouts, covers, and illustrations for magazines, including Vogue, The Echo, Harper’s Bazar, and The Ladies’ Home Journal. In many of these publications, he contributed written works about printmaking and design. An industrious artist, he illustrated and sold hundreds of high-quality posters while designing several covers for special edition prints of novels, such as Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle. After purchasing his own printing press in 1895, The Wayside Press in Springfield, Massachusetts, he funded the production of Bradley, His Book through heavy advertising from paper companies and other local printing presses. This little magazine, while not a profitable or enduring venture, allowed Bradley to experiment as an artist, editor, writer, and businessman.

By his death in 1962, William H. Bradley was one of the most well-respected and iconic type composers, layout designers, and illustrators in the United States.

Arthur Hoeber
“Philistinism In Art.”

August F. Jacacci
“Parisian Notes”

Aubrey Beardsley
Illustration of “Rape of the Lock, Title Page”

Edward Burne-Jones
Illustration of “A Page from Chaucer”

George W. Cable
“At the Edge of the Woods”

Harriet Monroe
“Life and Death”

William Morris
“Gossip About An Old House”
“The Life and Death of Jason”
“The Story of the Glittering Plain”

Madeline Yale Wynne
“In Nether Spaces”

Margaret Christine Whiting
“The City in Which I Died”

Maxfield Parrish
“The Philadelphia Horse Show”
“No Gentleman of France”

Percival Pollard
“After Many Days”

Tudor Jenks
“In An Old Library”
“An Island Queen”

William H. Bradley
Multiple illustrations and written contributions in every issue

Bambace, Anthony.Will H. Bradley: His Work : A Bibliographical Guide. New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 1995. Print.

Bradley, His Book. Springfield, Massachusetts: The Wayside Press, 1896-1897. JSTOR collection.

Brooker, Peter and Andrew Thacker. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.

Koch, Robert, 1918-2003. “Will Bradley and the Art Nouveau Poster.” Magazine Antiques 134 (1988): 812–821. Print.

“Bradley, His Book” complied by Hannah Grace Heartfelt (Davidson College, Class of ’16)

Title: 
The Blindman (April 1917)
The Blind Man (May 1917)

Date of Publication: 
April 1917 (1.1); May 1917 (1.2)

Place(s) of Publication: 
New York, NY

Frequency of Publication: 
Twice

Circulation:
Unknown

Publisher:
Henri Pierre Roché, 33 West 67th Street, New York

Physical Description: 
Issue 1: 8 pages
Issue 2: 16 pages
Deluxe Version : 19.5″ x 12″ printed on fine Japanese Vellum paper
Standard Version : 19.5″ x 12″ printed on standard non glossy paper

Price:
15 cents

Editor(s):
Marcel Duchamp
Beatrice Wood
Henri Pierre Roché

Associate Editor(s):
None

Libraries with Complete Original Issues: 
The Whitney Museum of American Art Library; University College of London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library (1:2); University of Iowa (1:2)

Reprint Editions: 
PDF of second issue available online at the University of Iowa’s International Dada Archive

Marcel Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, and Henri Pierre Roché collaborated on The Blindman in an effort to provide a forum for new artists, poets, and writers to display their experimental work. In the first of only two issue of the magazine, the editors wrote that “New York, so far ahead of its time in so many ways, yet indifferent to art in the making, is going to learn to think for itself, and no longer accept, mechanically, the art reputations made abroad” (2). Although none of the editors ever labeled the magazine an explicitly Dadaist publication, The Blindman is considered to be one of the first publications of the New York Dada movement.

The first issue was dedicated to the opening of the Independent Exhibition, an exhibit crafted by Marcel Duchamp, Katherine Dreier, and Walter Arensberg and funded for by the Society of Independent Artists. The concept behind the exhibit was the same as that of the magazine: to open the eyes of the public to the work being created that went ignored by elitist art critics and scholars. Nevertheless, Duchamp’s “readymade” Fountain, signed under the name “R. Mutt,” was rejected by the Independent Exhibition‘s selection committee. The second and last issue of The Blind Man expressed support for “R. Mutt” and criticized the Society for their narrow-mindedness. The issue also featured work by Mina Loy, Francis Picaba, Walter Conrad Arensburg, and others. Despite the magazine’s note that “Brave people who like to run risks may send to The Blind Man five dollars as subscription and encouragement,” the magazine failed to produce a third issue. The reason the editors changed the spelling of the magazine’s title in the second issue is unknown.

Although the editors of The Blindman never published an explicit manifesto, the first issue did include a paragraph detailing the little magazine’s goals:

“The Blindman’s procedure shall be that of referendum.
He will publish the questions and answers sent to him.
He will print what the artists and the public have to say.
He is very keen to receive suggestions and criticisms.
So, don’t spare him.

Here are his intentions:
He will publish reproductions of the most talked-of works.
He will give a chance to the leaders of any ‘school’ to ‘explain’ (provided they speak human).
He will print an annual Indeps for poetry, in a supplement open to all.
He will publish drawings, poems, and stories written and illustrated by children”

The Blindman. 1:1 (10 April 1917): 4.

Marcel Duchamp (Jul. 28, 1887 – Oct. 2, 1968)
Co-Editor: Apr. – May 1917

Marcel Duchamp was born into an artistic family in Blainville, France. Both his brother and half-brother were painters. Duchamp’s 1913 painting Nude Descending a Staircase sent shockwaves through the New York modernist scene for “its depiction of a nude, its nonrepresentational character, and its expression of motion,” and in 1915 Duchamp relocated from war-torn Paris to left wartime Paris to New York’s receptive art scene (Scott 66). Upon his arrival he joined the Arensberg circle, a group of radical artists, poets, and philosophers who convened at the home of Walter and Louise Arensberg. In 1917 Duchamp helped conceive the Independent Exhibition, a show in which any artist would be able to put his or her works on display. Duchamp submitted one of his first “readymades,” the infamous Fountain, under the pseudonym R. Mutt; to his outrage, the urinal was rejected by the Society (Scott 68). Undeterred, Duchamp stayed in New York until 1918, working on his masterpiece The Large Glass. Returning to Paris, Duchamp joined Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia and Man Ray in making Paris the international center for Dada (Scott 68). Duchamp eventually gave up producing art to pursue his lifelong passion for chess, and became an American citizen in 1955.

Beatrice Wood (Mar. 3, 1893 – Mar. 12, 1998)
Co-Editor: Apr. – May 1917

Although her wealthy San Franciscan family discouraged it, Beatrice Wood was determined to become an artist. Gaining admittance to the prestigious Académie Julian in Paris to study painting, Wood’s dreams seemed to be coming true until the onset of the First World War forced her return to America. She began acting in New York City, where she would meet Marcel Duchamp, her lifelong friend and occasional lover. Duchamp first introduced Wood to Henri Pierre Roché. Through the influence of these two men that Wood became involved in New York Dada: as she once proclaimed in a lecture, “What is Dada about this lecture is that I know nothing about Dada. I was only in love with men connected with it, which I suppose is as near to being Dada as anything” (Franklin 105). In 1916 Wood’s drawing Mariage D’une Amie (Marriage of a Female Friend), appeared in the little magazine Rogue, and her following year’s painting un peut d’eau dans du savon (A Little Water in Some Soap), received wide praise at the Independent Exhibition (Franklin 112). In 1918 Wood left New York for a brief stint in Montreal theater. When she returned to New York, Wood found that her old circle of friends had dissolved, so she moved west to Los Angeles to be close to the Arensbergs. There she pursued pottery and created magnificent glazes and forms for the rest of her life. Before her death in 1998 she was the sole surviving member of the Arensberg circle. She was 105.

Henri Pierre Roché (May 28, 1879 – April 9, 1959)
Co-Editor: Apr. – May 1917

Parisian Henri Pierre Roché was an avid art collector and dealer, journalist, and novelist. Accompanying Marcel Duchamp to New York in 1915, he became a member of the Arensberg circle, where he became famed for his many liaisons with Dada women, including Beatrice Wood, Clara Tice, and Louise Arensberg herself (Franklin 105). At the end of World War I Roché returned to France, where he wrote and continuing to collect and deal artwork. His most famous novel, Jules et Jim, was adapted into a movie by the French director François Truffaut in 1962. Roché died in Sèvres, France in 1959.

Anonymous
“The Richard Mutt Case”

Walter Conrad Arensberg
“Axiom”
“Theorem”

Robert Carlton Brown
“Eyes on the Half Shell”
“A Resolution Made at Bronx Park”

Gabrielle Buffet
Marie Laurencin

Frank Crowninshield
“From a friend”

Charles Demuth
“For Richard Mutt”

Marcel Duchamp
Cover Drawing (No. 2)

Charles Duncan
“Third Dimension; Portrait Sketch”

Alfred Frueh
Cover Illustration (No. 1)

Mina Loy
“In…Formation”
“[Untitled Poem]”
“O Marcel—otherwise I Also Have Been to Louise’s”

Allen Norton
“[Untitled Poem]”

Louise Norton
“Buddha of the Bathroom”

Francis Picabia
“Medusa”

Henri Pierre Roché
“The Blind Man

Erik Satie
“Tale by Erik Satie”
“Poem”

Joseph Stella
Coney Island

Francis Simpson Stevens
“[Untitled Poem]”

Alfred Stieglitz
Fountain, R. Mutt
“Letter to the Editors”

Clara Tice
Drawing

Beatrice Wood
“Why I Come to the Independents”
“Work of a Picture Hanger”
“Dream of a Picture Hanger”

“Biography of Beatrice Wood.” Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts. 2006-2009.

Franklin, Paul B. “Beatrice Wood, Her Dada…and Her Mama.” Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity. Ed. Naomi Sawelson-Gorse. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. 104-137.

Image, Apr. 1917 issue. “Rarities from 1917: Facsimiles of The Blind Man No. 1, The Blind Man No. 2, and Rongwrong.” Tout-Fait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal. 1.3 (Dec. 2000). Web. 14 July 2009.

Images, May 1917 issue. “Digital Dada Library Collection.” The International Dada Archive. 2007. University of Iowa. Web. 14 July 2009.

Kimmelman, Michael. “Forever Dada: Much Ado Championing the Absurd; Much Ado over the Absurd.” The New York Times 22 Nov. 1996: C1.

Razutis, Al. “Marcel Duchamp.” The American Beat Museum. 2003. Web.

Scott, William B., and Peter M. Rutkoff. New York Modern. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999.

“The Blindman” compiled by Katharine Schulmann (Class of ’07, Davidson College)

Title:
The Anvil: The Proletarian Fiction Magazine
Later united with Partisan Review to form Partisan Review and Anvil

Date of Publication:
May 1933 – November 1935

Place(s) of Publication:
Moberly, Missouri

Frequency of Publication:
Bimonthly

Circulation:
Varied between 850 (Summer 1934) and 4,000 (3:13)

Publisher:
The Anvil Press, Moberly, Missouri.

Physical Description:
7 1/2″ x 10 1/2.” 30 pages of fiction and poetry. Some illustrations, typically small political cartoons or article accompaniments rather than art reproductions. No. 1- 10 published without Vol. numbers, No. 11-12 printed as Vol. 2, No. 13 as Vol. 3.

Price:
15 cents

Editor(s):
Jack Conroy

Associate Editor(s):
Walter Snow (March/April 1935 – Oct./Nov. 1935, no. 10 – 3:13)
Clinton Simpson (May/June 1935 – Oct./Nov. 1935, 2:11 – 3:13)
Michael Gold (October/November 1935, 3:13)

Libraries with Complete Original Issues:
Harvard University; Brown University; University of Virginia; University of Wisconsin, Madison; Indiana University

Reprint Editions:
New York: AMS Reprint Co., 1963.

Jack Conroy founded The Anvil in May, 1933, as an outlet for the Midwestern farming and working community to express their opinions in the midst of stifling living conditions. A laborer himself during the Great Depression, Conroy began publishing The Anvil, a magazine of fiction, out of his hometown in Moberly, Missouri, where economic and natural forces had combined to oppress the working classes.

Although The Anvil and its editors did not take a definitive political stance, its contributors were strongly proletarian. Many glorified the Soviet Union in their stories and advocated its philosophies’ extensions into America, with hopes that a leftist society would rectify the problems their working class experienced. Conroy did not explicitly propose a militant changeover, but he did create a forum for writers to advocate such proletarian values.

The Anvil did not receive contributions from more well-known authors, with the exception of a small number of prose pieces and poems by Langston Hughes. The magazine preferred the vigor of the average man, and it offered America’s working class a chance to speak their minds. Louis Adamic captured the true purpose of The Anvil when he described Jack Conroy as “one of the leaders in the movement which aim[ed] to demonstrate ‘that the life of common workers and the stench of their sweat and toil are as authentic literary material as the vicissitudes of society’” (14).

Jack Conroy describes the mission of the magazine in the inaugural issues of The Anvil:

“Contributors to The Anvil, successor to The Rebel Poet, and members of the Proletarian Writers’ League, successor to The Rebel Poets, need not be Communists, of course. My associate editors and I are going to try to present vital, vigorous material drawn from the farms, mines, mills, factories and offices of America. We’ll not devote much space to theoretical problems. For theoretical guidance, we refer you to The New Masses and International Literature.”

Jack Conroy, “The Anvil and its Aims.” 1:1 (May 1933): 4.

Later in the magazine’s run, the establishment of the Anvil League of Writers suggested a shift in the publication’s philosophy:

“The League also will try to improve the literary standard of THE ANVIL and to develop promising young writers. It will urge authors not only to deal with proletarian material but also to create revolutionary stories by bringing out the implications of the ceaseless class struggle between capital and labor, the internal conflicts within the classes as seen from a revolutionary viewpoint.”

“National Organizational Committee.” No. 9 (Jan. 1935): 30.

Jack Conroy (Dec. 5, 1898 – Feb. 28, 1990)
Editor: May 1933 – Oct. / Nov. 1935

Born in a coal-mining camp near Moberly, Missouri, Jack Conroy experienced early tragedy when his father died in a mining explosion in 1909, which forced Conroy to leave school at the age of thirteen to work in a car shop. After World War I he returned to school, taking classes at the University of Missouri, Columbia in the fall of 1920. After losing his job because of the Great Railroad Strike of 1922, Conroy traveled the Midwest looking for low-paying jobs. An avid reader, he began to write from the perspective of a laborer and sought to open a forum for others to do so as well. During the Depression-plagued ’30s, he edited The Rebel Poet from 1931-32 and founded The Anvil in 1933, which merged with the Partisan Review in 1935. In that same year, however, Conroy clashed with Communist party leaders who helped finance the magazine, and lost his editorial privileges. Despite an effort to reenter the magazine scene with the Chicago-based New Anvil in 1939, the magazine did not gain popularity and closed the next year.

Nelson Algren
“Pastoral”
“Within the City”
“A Holiday in Texas”

S. Balch
“Red Letter”
“To the Manlovers of Our Local Four Hundred”

B. C. Hagglund
“The One-Man Revolution”

Langston Hughes
“Park Bench”
“Ballad of Lenin”
“Dr. Brown’s Decision”

Boris Israel
“Will They Believe Us?”

Orrick Johns
“For A Dead Speaker”
“July Twenty-eight, 1932”

H. H. Lewis
“Down the Skidway”
“Dogmatrix”

Vladimir Pillin
“For Defense”

John C. Rogers
“When the Sap Rises”
“Middle Class”

Edwin Rolfe
“Not Men Alone”
“Barn in Wisconsin”
“Something Still Lives”

George Salvatore
“I’ll Steal First”

Leonard Spier
“Battle in Embryo”

Henry George Weiss
“To the Soviet Union”
“Lenin Lives”

Richard Wright
“Child of the Dead and Forgotten Gods”

Adamic, Louis. “Nothing to Lose.” Saturday Review of Literature 12.14 (1935): 14.

Cheyney, Ralph, and Jack Conroy, eds. Unrest: The Rebel Poets’ Anthology for 1929. London: Arthur H. Stockwell, Ltd., 1929.

Anvil: The Proletarian Fiction Magazine. 1935. Microfilm. No. 1 – 13. New York: New York Public Library.

Gale, Robert L. “Conroy, Jack.” American National Biography Online. Feb. 2000. Davidson College Lib., Davidson, NC. 26 Oct 2004.

Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947.

Larsen, Erling. “Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited or, The Way It Was.” Proletarian Writers of the Thirties. Ed. David Madden. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1968.

Murphy, James F. The Proletarian Movement: The Controversy over Leftism in Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

Nelson, Cary. Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

Phelps, Wallace. “Form and Content.” Partisan Review 11.6 (1935): 31-39.

“The Anvil” compiled by David Tulis (Class of ’05, Davidson College)