Rare Book Monthly
Book Catalogue Reviews - December - 2008 Issue
Weird Science, Religion, Poetry, Etc. from Garrett Scott, Bookseller
Dr. Burke worried about the health of everyone but his nurse, whom he attempted to kill.
Richard Griffin is something of a celebrity in then field of eccentric and bad poets. Item 84 is his The Melancholy Yak and Other Poems, published in 1917. Among his verses is the classic: "While upon earth I was living, / Fridays, I ran about giving / Catholic Wops hungry young / Sandwiches, made of beef tongue." Weren't Friday's reserved for fish? $150. If you like this, the good news is that Scott has a couple more Griffin classics available for sale.
Dr. William P. Burke offered a mix of sensible dietary advice and quackery circa the early 1900s in The Constructive and Remedial Properties of Food. He recommended a natural diet, although he strongly condemned root beer. Burke ran Burke's Sanitarium in Santa Rosa, California, but his career was disrupted when he was convicted of attempting to kill one his nurses by blowing her up as she slept in a tent. Item 33. $50.
Charles Pease was an early anti-smoking crusader. The New York dentist has been credited with advancing legislation to outlaw smoking in subways and other public places. Item 139 is his The Smoking Rector, published in 1936. Despite his success in combating smoking, Scott notes. "(h)is efforts against ginger ale, meat, vinegar, and lollipops, however, met with only mixed success." $25.
Item 92 is Stories, by Jessie Heckman, published in 1896. She mixes true stories, such as an 1894 tour of the White House, with the fantastic like an invasion of giants: "when the little girl and her mother saw all the giants coming, she went to the barn and called the hired man and he came in and brought his Gattling gun and gattled and gattled until he killed all the giants, but the big one" [were the other giants small?]. Miss Heckman can be forgiven her childish prose. She was only six at the time. Jessie was the daughter of Chicago attorney Wallace Heckman, and while we cannot be certain, believe she grew up to be Jessie Heckman Herschl, who graduated from the University of Chicago and, half a century later, was writing articles about the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. This copy is signed in a juvenile signature by Miss Heckman dated July 20, 1896. Had she become a famous author, this book would probably be extraordinarily expensive, but she did not, so it is priced at $50.
