Sentimental Song Book, The.
Grand Rapids, Mich.: C. M. Loomis, Book and Job Printer, 1876 [but 1893].
One of three issues of this pseudo-facsimile republication. 16mo, original printed gray wrappers, 66, [2] pages, wire stitched. Engraved portrait. Wrappers a bit sunned and worn and soiled; some light, scattered foxing; a very good copy.
At the head of the title, "Centennial, 1876.” The cornerstone work—though admittedly in a later edition, preceded by the virtually unobtainable 1876 edition and three subsequent editions published in the 1870s (also scarce)—from the original Sweet Singer of Michigan, a renowned poet of surpassing strangeness and the author of such classics as "Ashtabula Disaster" and "Grand Rapids Cricket Club”—"From Milwaukee their club did come, /With thoughts of skill at play, / But beat they was, and they went home— / Had nothing more to say.”
Moore became something of a sensation on the stage and her readings were well-attended—though admittedly most in the audience came to deride her skills as a poet; as A. H. Greenly notes in his article “The Sweet Singer of Michigan Bibliographically Considered" (Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 39, second quarter 1945), after one such reading, “Julia's wrath was evidently kindled upon this occasion and her eyes opened to the truth that she was being ridiculed, for, according to those who were present, at the close of her reading she arose to her full, majestic height, and said 'you people paid fifty cents each to see a fool, but I got fifty dollars to look at a house full of fools." Moore's family was understandably upset at the public ridicule and "her husband forbade her writing any more for publication, an injunction which she evidently obeyed."
Greenly's bibliographical examination of copies of the Sentimental Song Book uncovered this edition, "probably published by Loomis in 1893, for sale at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago. It is doubtful that it was published with intent to defraud. It is not a facsimile, and contains many differences from the genuine first edition. ... This edition contains seven of Mrs. Moore's better poems not contained in the first edition.”
Greenly 7 (b) (no known priority among the three known issues of this republication).
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