Paul McPharlin was born in Detroit on 22 December 1903. He was the only child of William H. J. McPharlin and his wife Frances (née Lohmeyer) – his father was born in America of Irish parents and his mother in America of an American father and a Danish mother. His father was a Catholic, and his mother a Christian Scientist, though Paul himself was to reject all organised religion later in life. The family were fairly well–to–do, his father being a manager and later executive of R.L. Polk & Co., the well–known publisher of American city directories, a job which meant the family moved around from city to city quite a lot. As a result, Paul McPharlin, who lived with his parents until he was forty, had no pressing need to earn a living like other young men of his age, and could afford to indulge his extensive artistic and theatrical interests, though his father did not always approve of these. His mother, though, doted on him, and he on her, part of the reason he didn’t leave the parental home till so late in life.
His interest in puppetry was first aroused in childhood, but it was while he was studying at Columbia University in the early 1920s that his interest in puppetry really took off, it remaining a key interest for him throughout his life. In fact, he is probably better known for his promotion of puppet theatre and his documentation of its history, than he is for book illustration (1), though he illustrated numerous books, notably for the Peter Pauper Press, as we shall see. From 1930 until his death in 1948 he published Puppetry: a Yearbook of Puppets and Marionettes and in 1937 founded the society Puppeteers of America, which is still going strong today. He self–published numerous booklets and pamphlets about making puppets, creating the stage sets for puppet shows, suitable plays to perform, and such like. Because there was a lack of suitable material for what might be called artistic puppet plays (as opposed to those aimed at children), he wrote some plays himself (2a) – “St. George and the Dragon” in 1931 (2b); the strange and racially charged “Lincoln and the Pig” in the same year (2c), and an adaptation of the Faustus story in “Dr. Faust” in 1934, for example (2d). He put on a marionette version of John Alden Carpenter’s “Krazy Kat Ballet” in 1930 (the original was a jazz pantomime, incidentally!) (2e) and also concocted an opera for puppets, “Mozart in Paris” in 1932–3 (2f). He had an interest in the cubist, surrealist and futurist experiments of some avant–garde marionettists (2g), but unfortunately never seems to have ventured into these realms himself. He was the author of two classic books in the field of puppetry, A Repertory of Marionette Plays (Viking Press, New York, 1929), for which he did the illustrations, dust–jacket & title–page, and The Puppet Theatre in America – a History, with a List of Puppeteers 1524–1948 (Harper & Brothers, New York, 1949), still a standard reference work today. He also edited and contributed an introduction to The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Punch and Judy (The Limited Editions Club, New York, 1937), John Payne Collier’s original edition of which had been published in London in 1828.
Through much of his puppeteering career McPharlin had collaborated with fellow enthusiast Marjorie Batchelder, whom he eventually married (after something of a struggle on Marjorie’s part!) on 30 March 1948. Sadly it was to be a short–lived marriage, for Paul McPharlin died as a result of an inoperable brain tumour, in Birmingham Michigan, where he had lived for some years, on 28 September 1948. In 1952 his wife and the McPharlin family donated Paul McPharlin’s extensive collection of theatre–related materials and some 274 puppets to the Detroit Institute of Arts. His wife also added a supplement (“Puppets in America since 1948”) to his history of the puppet theatre in America, the extended edition being published by Plays Inc., of Boston, in 1969. Marjorie Batchelder McPharlin survived her husband by many years, dying in 1997 at the age of 93.
A photograph of Paul McPharlin, with puppets, taken at an unspecified date, though probably in the early 1940s, is shown in Fig.1.
Paul McPharlin was a book lover, and one who was interested in all aspects of book production, be it illustration (including the use of photography), typography, printing and binding. He wrote Roman Numerals, Typographic Leaves, and Pointing Hands: Some Notes on their Origin, History and Contemporary Use, an 87 page monograph published by The Typophiles, in New York in 1942, and Books from the North River Press in Specimen Pages; Together with Notes on the Specially Distributed Book and Information to Aid the Makers of Books (North River Press, 1947). He was also a book designer (2h) most notably of the seven–volume edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, edited & with an Introduction by J.B. Bury, and illustrated with engravings by Piranesi, which was published by the Limited Editions Club in New York in 1946.
Aside from a few minor projects done in the 1920s (2i), his debut as a full book illustrator appears to have been in a limited edition of Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven and Other Poems, published by the Fine Book Circle in his then home–town of Birmingham, Michigan, in 1936. (The Fine Book Circle was actually set up by McPharlin himself, on a subscription basis, and operated until 1941.) Two of its curious black and white illustrations are shown in Fig.2a (the frontispiece) and Fig.2b (illustrating the poem “To Helen”.) These were actually “brush drawings” (2j), though they do have the appearance of having been done using paper cut–outs, akin to the well–known silhouette drawings, particularly profile portraits, so popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. McPharlin certainly used this technique elsewhere (3), notably in his editions of Angelica and Other Cats (of which more below) and Chinese Love Lyrics, the latter “with decorative cut–outs” as the title–page tells us (Fig.3a), posthumously published by the Peter Pauper Press (hereafter PPP) in 1964. Two examples are shown in Fig.3b (p.41) & Fig.3c (p.61.) (These illustrations were done originally for the PPP’s Chinese Love Poems published in 1942, the title page of which dubbed them decorations rather than decorative cut–outs.)
McPharlin’s first illustrated book for the PPP – he did about 20 in all – appears to have been Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, undated but known to have been published in 1939 (4a). The decoration on the title–page is shown in Fig.4a and one of its illustrations, the headpiece to Part 2, in Fig.4b. In the same year, though again undated (4b), PPP published his illustrated Sayings of Confucius, an edited version of which, with the same illustrations, was recycled by the PPP as The Wisdom of Confucius, published fifteen years after McPharlin’s death, in 1963. The title page illustration of the latter edition is shown in Fig.5a (note the P McP monogram to the lower right) and two of its charming head–pieces in Fig.5b (“On Duties of Sons”) and Fig.5c (“On Learning”) – these last (like the other head–pieces) having the curious appearance of a puppet show without the strings!
In 1940 (though it was undated (4c)) McPharlin illustrated his first edition of The Rubaiyat for the PPP, for which he did 8 illustrations (including the frontispiece) accompanying the text of FitzGerald’s fourth version, and with an illustrated colophon at the end. The illustrations seem to be generic, their contents governed by the artist’s own overall view of the text, in which he seems to follow the mildly erotic undertones imagined and exploited to a greater extent by the likes of Ronald Balfour, John Buckland Wright and John Yunge Bateman – the scantily clad dancing girls (or houris ?) of Fig.6a (frontispiece) and Fig.6b (facing quatrains 14 & 15) certainly bear no relation to FitzGerald’s text. True, Fig.6c (facing quatrain 1) may relate to the opening quatrain, with the rising Sun and the Sultan’s Turret, but Fig.6d (facing quatrains 38 & 39) relates to neither of these quatrains, being more akin to quatrain 25 if anything, with its Tower of Darkness (but without the Muezzin !) Fig.6e (facing quatrains 24 & 25), though it could conceivably relate to quatrain 24, is more likely to be a stock illustration of Omar and his Beloved. (It is interesting that McPharlin avoided the famous “Book of Verses underneath the Bough”, as indeed he did the equally famous Potter’s Shop.) Again, it is difficult to see what direct connections Fig.6f (facing quatrains 52 & 53), Fig.6g (facing quatrains 66 & 67) and Fig.6h (facing quatrains 80 & 81) have to any of the quatrains. Fig.6f seems to relate generally to the pleasures of this life (here represented by a garden fountain, music and a bowl of luscious fruit); Fig.6g to scholarly pursuits; and Fig.6h (perhaps!) to Omar’s life journey, though these are admittedly only guesses. Of course, if the illustrations are indeed generic, there is no need to link them to specific quatrains, or to locate them at any specific points in the text. Finally, and oddly, the colophon (Fig.6i) appears to be the only reference to that key theme of The Rubaiyat, drinking Wine! (Though the bunch of grapes in the bowl of fruit in Fig.6f is perhaps a nod in that direction.)
The first edition of 1940 was seemingly followed (or preceded – see below; possibly accompanied – see under Voltaire below) by what is probably the most commonly encountered edition today, also undated (5), using only five of the illustrations (Figs.6a, 6b, 6c, 6d & 6e) but now accompanying the text of FitzGerald’s first version. The illustrations in it, too, seem to be located in a fairly haphazard manner within the text, bearing no relation to their locations in FitzGerald’s first version, again, of course, perfectly acceptable if the illustrations are generic.
[The illustrations can be browsed here.]
It has been pointed out that a superficial view of the two editions side by side, in or out of their respective slip–cases, finds them virtually indistinguishable without a close look at their contents. This perhaps explains the fairly common belief that there was only one McPharlin edition.
As regards the dates of first publication of these two editions, no source that I have seen establishes a definite date for either – most use [1940] or “1940 (?)” for either or both. Sometimes gift inscriptions can help, but not here, alas. Of the longer edition with 8 illustrations, I know of three inscribed copies, but two date to 1950 and one to 1951; of the shorter edition with 5 illustrations, I know of four inscribed copies, but all date to 1946. Whether this indicates a later publication date than the usually assumed 1940 is impossible to say with any certainty at present, given such a small sample of dated copies.
As regards the illustrations, there is a noticeable difference in style (more use of white, in particular) between Figs.6a–6e and Figs.6f–6h, as if the latter were ‘tagged on’ at the end of the former, which might suggest that the shorter version preceded the longer one [browse here.] Again, as regards the human figures in Figs.6a, 6b & 6e, these struck me as rather amateurish productions – one correspondent has aptly described them as “awkward and wooden.” It may well be that McPharlin wasn’t very good when it came to depicting the human figure, but another view might be that they were intentionally and literally wooden – dolls or marionettes without strings.
I was alerted to this possibility when I found myself thinking that it would have been an interesting experiment if McPharlin had illustrated The Rubaiyat in the cartoon / puppet style of his head–pieces for The Wisdom of Confucius. Or again, since McPharlin had a particular interest in oriental shadow puppets, if he had used the silhouette–type technique he used in The Raven and Other Poems. After all, as FitzGerald’s quatrain 46 (of the first version) has it:
For in and out, above, about below,‘Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow–show, Play’d in a Box whose Candle is the Sun,Round which we Phantom Figures come and go.
Perhaps, then, McPharlin did turn to puppetry in his Rubaiyat illustrations, but not in the cartoon or shadow forms about which I had idly mused. Or perhaps not: it has been suggested that any resemblance to dolls / marionettes is simply an accidental by–product of his poor rendering of the human figure – possibly a result of his puppetry background. Readers must make up their own minds, but the same issue will arise again later.
John A.B. McLeish, writing of “The Peter Pauper Series” in his Books of the Week column in The Gazette (Montreal) on 26 July 1946 (p.6), whilst praising McPharlin’s illustrations for the PPP edition of The Songs of Sappho (“a book of singular artistic beauty done in pastel shades and with an eye to pure Hellenistic simplicity”) and Emerson’s Select Essays (“this beautiful little book...as perfect a wedding of bookcraft with content as could be wished”) – on both of which, more below – had little enthusiasm for his Rubaiyat illustrations. He wrote:
The illustrations set the atmosphere but miss that exotic breath without which something of the inner heart is lost from the Rubaiyat; one would hardly expect the lavish illustrations of such an artist as Willie (sic) Pogany in this series of beautiful but inexpensive books, but the austerity which becomes Sappho and the Essays hardly becomes the Rubaiyat.
Readers will be able to judge for themselves in the next section.
McPharlin illustrated an edition of Edmond Rostand’s play in five acts, Cyrano de Bergerac, first published by the PPP in 1941 (4d). Fig.7a is his imagined portrait of Cyrano and Fig.7b his theatrical headpiece to Act 1, Scene 1. (The first scene of each Act has a similarly theatrical headpiece.) He also illustrated / decorated Select Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which was undated but probably published in the same year (4e). Fig.8a is the headpiece for the Essay on Self–Reliance and Fig.8b for that on Love. These are not particularly interesting, but I include them here on account their mention in McLeish’s overview of the PPP quoted above. Of much greater interest are the other illustrations he mentions, those of The Songs of Sappho.
PPP published two editions of these, both illustrated by McPharlin, the first being dated 1942 and the second undated but generally reckoned to have been published in 1946 (4f). Two examples from the 1942 edition are shown here as Fig.9a (p.8) and Fig.9b (p.103), and two from the 1946 edition as Fig.10a (title–page) and Fig.10b (p.21). It would be interesting to know why PPP wanted a new set of illustrations for their 1946 edition, rather than simply re–using those from the 1942 edition, as both are rather effective in their different ways, but no information is available.
It hardly matters which edition of Sappho McLeish had in mind when he talked of “a book of singular artistic beauty done in pastel shades and with an eye to pure Hellenistic simplicity” and the “austerity which becomes Sappho and the Essays [but which] hardly becomes the Rubaiyat.” His use the word “austerity” is a bit odd – I can only assume he means “simplicity”, for McPharlin’s simple technique in both Sappho editions successfully conveys an Ancient Grecian flavour, as indeed McLeish himself says, whereas his simple Rubaiyat illustrations, though vaguely oriental, do not convey the wine–drinking agnosticism of Omar’s quatrains. The decorations of Emerson’s Essays, of course, are simpler still – neat, but somewhat minimalist. However, though I am no great fan of McPharlin’s Rubaiyat illustrations, I am not sure that these decorations of Emerson’s Essays fairly demonstrate their inadequacy.
Moving to the mid–1940s now we come to McPharlin’s illustrations for Voltaire, to whom the PPP devoted two different though related books: Voltaire’s Alphabet of Wit (4g) and Satirical Dictionary of Voltaire (4h). Both appear to have been first published in 1945, the second being effectively an expanded edition of the first (this prompting the above comment that two versions of The Rubaiyat might have been published together in 1940.) Both, of course, derive from Voltaire’s famous Philosophical Dictionary. Fig.11a is common to both, and is the illustration to the article “Adam” – note the almost puppet–like forms of Adam and Eve; Fig.11b, in a totally different style, is again common to both, and is the illustration of the article “Incubi”; and the strange illustration in Fig.11c is again common to both, but illustrates the article “Quack” in Alphabet and “Laughter” in Dictionary – in the former it shows the quack doctor laughing at his duped patients. Unique to Dictionary are Fig.11d (illustrating the article “Books”), Fig.11e (illustrating the article “Elegance”) and Fig.11f (illustrating the article “Love”.) The first and third of these seem to demonstrate such greater artistic skill than the second, that one is tempted to wonder if only the second was a McPharlin original, the other two being reproduced from drawings taken from some 19th century magazine or book (not cheating, but McPharlin wearing his book designer’s hat, as in his use of engravings by Piranesi in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, mentioned above.) Certainly the human figures in Figs.11d & 11f are far more accomplished than those in his Rubaiyat illustrations, so if McPharlin did the former why didn’t he use such skills in the latter ? Indeed, why didn’t he use the same skills in Fig.11e, whose figures are more puppet or doll–like ? Was he, perhaps, making a comment on the artificiality of Elegance, people as the puppets of fashion ? After all, it can be argued, artists can and do use different styles to different ends, so this may be a case in point. Indeed there is a considerable range of styles in Figs.11a-11f alone [browse here] – I particularly like Fig.11c, for example, which is very different in style from Fig.11a. Plus the bust at the top right of Fig.11d and the figure of Eros at the top right of Fig.11f arguably do have the mark of McPharlin about them, so perhaps these two illustrations do represent the upper end of McPharlin’s artistic skills which he chose not to use elsewhere for one reason or another (6). Or perhaps not: I will again leave readers to make up their own minds about all this.
The last book which McPharlin illustrated for PPP before his death was Spectator Papers, subtitled “Satirical & Philosophical Extracts from the Journal of that Name written 1711–5 by Addison and Steele etc”. It was undated, but seemingly published in 1948 (4i). Two examples of its illustrations are shown here as Fig.12a (Accomplished Wives) and Fig.12b (Quarrelling in Public). McPharlin also wrote the interestng and well–researched three page Introductory Note to the book.
In 1946, Hastings House Publishers of New York, issued four little books in their Hastings House Americana series, two of which were written and illustrated by McPharlin: Life and Fashion in America 1650–1900 and Love and Courtship in America. These again demonstrate McPharlin’s wide range of interests.
Two sample illustrations from the first are shown in Fig.13a (A Wig Maker, Philadelphia, 1730) and Fig.13b (The Automobile, 1900).
Two from the second are shown in Fig.14a (Asking Papa) and Fig.14b (The Elopement.) McPharlin’s commentaries for both are well worth reproducing here (Fig.14c) for their humour.
The rather crude comic–book style of the illustrations for both books may be deliberately designed to appeal to younger readers, of course, rather than the result of poor draughtsmanship.
McPharlin was “an inveterate collector of ephemeral oddities and miscellaneous tidbits of information”, doing an “odd fellows of the book” column for the literary periodical The Dolphin (2k) – in one edition he broached the gruesome subject of books bound in human skin, for example. In the course of researching this essay I discovered, quite by accident, that McPharlin had also been a keen contributor to the English journal Notes and Queries, sometimes answering the queries of others, sometimes posing queries of his own. Thus, for example, he was able to supply much information about “Marionette Plays” (June 1928, p.446) in response to an earlier query by another reader. Again, he asked for information about “Punch and Judy Showmen” (March 1930, p.188), inviting any reminiscences of their performances, and about “McDonough and Earnshaw, Marionettists” (May 1930, p.385), an English company who moved to America to tour there in about 1878. More interesting for the general reader, though, is his request for information about “Lewis Carroll’s Marionette Ballad Opera” (March 1930, p.150), the unpublished manuscript of which he knew had been recently sold at auction (actually at Sotheby’s in February 1929), and the whereabouts of which he was clearly eager to know.
Though a Lewis Carroll fan myself (as indeed was McPharlin (2l)), I must confess that I had never heard of this “marionette ballad opera”, but a little sleuthing revealed it to have been titled La Guida di Bragia: a Ballad Opera for the Marionette Theatre. It is the only known survivor of a number of plays written by Dodgson in his late teens for the entertainment of his young brothers and sisters. Ironically, it was first published in the Christmas number of the ladies’ magazine The Queen in 1930, only a few months after McPharlin’s request for information appeared in Notes and Queries.
McPharlin clearly had a wide range of interests, as the titles of a selection of his contributions reveals: “Mechanical Entertainments with Graeco–Latin Names” (August 1927, p.137); “The Rocking Chair in the United States” (March 1930, p.210);“ “Straw Hats in the USA” (June 1930, p.422); “Domestic Articles fallen into Disuse” (February 1932, p.124) and “Phonographic Records of Literary Figures” (December 1932, p.447). Some merit more than a mere glance at the title. Thus, “The Cow in Town Planning” (June 1929, p.446) asks whether some of the oddly directed streets in New York’s Greenwich Village follow old cow paths; “The Executioner’s Mask” (April 1927, p.296) and “Cow Masks at Southend” (March 1930, p.188) both reflect McPharlin’s interest in masks (he had a large collection of them (7)); “Disarmed Spiny Plants” (July 1930, p.49), whose subject was a spineless cactus that could be grown in arid soil and used as cattle fodder; and “Monosyllabic Verses” (April 1931, p.250) which quotes the well–known “Ode on the Antiquity of Microbes” by Strickland Gillilan: “Adam / Had ’em” as well as the anonymous rendering of Julius Caesar’s dying words: “U / 2 ?”. “Oscar Wilde’s translations from the Polish” (April 1930, p.248) concerns his ‘translation’ of a poem by the Polish actress Helena Modjeska. Wilde didn’t speak Polish, and, as McPharlin surmises, he actually only polished up a rough English translation given to him by the actress herself. It appeared under the title “Sen Artysty; or the Artist’s Dream” by Madame Helena Modjeska, “translated from the Polish by Oscar Wilde”, in Routledge’s Christmas Annual, The Green Room, in 1880 (8).
Finally, to lead us into the next section, McPharlin’s contribution “Cats in Literature” (April 1931, p.265) was one of many responses from various readers to an earlier appeal for information on the subject (one of which cited Oliver Herford’s Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten (1904), a title which will be well known to many readers of this essay.)
Paul McPharlin’s Angelica and Other Cats was published posthumously by The Lightning Tree, of Santa Fé, New Mexico in 1986, with an Introduction by Marjorie Batchelder McPharlin. It was described on the title–page as an Alphabetical Array of Rhymes and cut–paper pictures by Paul McPharlin. A note on the back cover of the book reads thus:
In 1926 Paul McPharlin set about to create a book “in vindication of the cat.” The result of his experiments in verse and drawing was the manuscript for Angelica. Here in this book are reproduced for the first time the twenty–six delicately cut paper silhouettes (slightly reduced in size) and their accompanying rhymes. Though he originally thought of the work as a children’s book he acknowledged in his later notes that Angelica and Other Cats was meant for cat lovers of all ages.
Two examples of the illustrations with their accompanying verses are shown in Fig.15a and Fig.15b.
It is interesting that of the four artists who illustrated editions of The Rubaiyat for the PPP prior to 1979 (the terminal date of Donnelly & Dobkin’s bibliography) – Paul McPharlin (1940), Vera Bock (1949), Jeff Hill (1956) and Jeanyee Wong (1961) (4j) – the first three were all cat lovers (though actually McPharlin seems never to have owned a cat.)
Note 1: A good article about him is to be found on the website of UNIMA (Union Internationale de la Marionnette) at https://wepa.unima.org/en/paul-mcpharlin/. In book form see Ryan Howard, Paul McPharlin and the Puppet Theater (2006). Though its main focus is on puppetry, it has a great deal of useful information about Paul McPharlin’s family life, his marriage, and his publishing activities, having been written with access to McPharlin’s letters and with the co–operation of his wife, Marjorie McPharlin. Chapter 1 is particularly useful for McPharlin’s early years, in particular for otherwise not readily available information about his differing relationships with his parents, his and their religious beliefs & disputes, the effects of his extended life in the parental home, and so forth.
Note 2: References here are to Ryan Howard’s book, cited in note 1 above. a) p.42 & p.49; b) p.49 & p.84–5; c) p.93; d) p.98–9; e) p.62; f) p.88; g) p.48; h) p.159; i) p.20; j) p.125; k) p.130; l) p.19–20 & p.149;
Note 3: McPharlin was also interested in three–dimensional work using cut–out paper. He wrote Paper Sculpture: its Construction and Uses for Display and Decoration (Marquardt & Co., New York, 1944) and Cutting Paper Sculpture: an X–Acto Handbook (X–Acto Crescent Products Co., New York 1946.)
Note 4: Sean Donnelly & J. B. Dobkin, The Peter Pauper Press of Peter and Edna Beilenson, 1928–1979: a Bibliography and History (2013): a) #440; b) ##468 & 469; c) #447; d) ##120 & 121; e) #478; f) they are ## 526 & 527 respectively; g) #582; h) ##465 & 466; i) #547; j) the four are listed as ##447–455 inclusive.
Note 5: This shorter edition is not mentioned in Donnelly & Dobkin. It features as #65 in Jos Coumans, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: an Updated Bibliography (2010), where it is given a date of 1940. This entry is based on Recalling Peter: the Life and Times of Peter Beilenson and his Peter Pauper Press, edited by Paul A. Bennet and with a Check–List by David M. Glixon, published by the Typophiles, New York, in 1964. On p.55 of the Check–List, under the year 1940, the entry says simply: “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, dec. by Paul McPharlin.” But of course this doesn’t say which version of FitzGerald was used, nor does it give the number of pages by which we might establish that, so it could refer to the longer edition, in which case Jos’s assumption of a 1940 date for the shorter edition is in doubt. Jos does not list the longer edition, incidentally. Both editions are to be found in Roger Paas, Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Related Materials: the John Roger Paas Collection (2023), ##3730–2 being the longer version, which he dates to 1940, and ##3733–8 the shorter version, to which no date is assigned. In Carl J. Weber and James Humphry III, FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat – Centennial Edition (1959), entry no.192 states: “Mount Vernon, N.Y., The Peter Pauper Press, 1940? 48 p. Fifth version. Illustrations by Paul McPharlin” and entry no.203 states: “Mount Vernon, N.Y., The Peter Pauper Press, 1950? 64 p. Collector’s edition. Fifth version. Illustrations by Paul McPharlin”. The problem is that no.192 has only 48 pages and no.203 has 64 pages, pagination which is consistent with no.192 using FitzGerald’s first version rather than his fifth (which effectively is also his fourth, of course), thus implying that the shorter edition appeared in 1940? and the longer in 1950? Either way, the question mark over 1940 remains.
Note 6: Ryan Howard (as note 1 above, p.13–8) says little about McPharlin’s training in Art. His time at Columbia University seem to have involved studying “world literary classics” and “writing” under the noted educator and author John Erskine, and later “the art of bookmaking” (p.15). He does not appear to have studied Art there, for in the summer of 1923 (he graduated from Columbia in 1924) “he made the trek to Chicago to take classes at the Art Institute” (p.17).
Note 7: He wrote the text and did the illustrations for An Exhibition of Masks: Occult and Utilitarian (Cranbrook Institute of Science, 1940.) A number of masks came from McPharlin’s own collection. Back in student days he had worked on a book about masks, titled Masks: Dance: Drama, but it was never published (Howard, as note 1, p.25.)
Note 8: See H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde: a Biography (Penguin Classic Biography, 2001 ed., p.41.)
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I must thank Jos Coumans, Fred Diba, Joe Howard, Sandra Mason & Bill Martin, and Roger Paas for supplying information about & scans of their copies of McPharlin’s editions of The Rubaiyat, and also for proof reading the article and making many useful observations & suggestions along the way.
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