The World Is Round Read Online

“The custom house let Gertrude Stein know that there was a package of ‘art’ for her and that she would have to pay some exorbitant duty on it. She replied that she didn’t know whether she would accept the package, so they let her see the contents in the custom house. She had a chance to judge the work, but of course she refused the package and had it returned to the Scotts in New York, thereby paying no duty at all.”

Gertrude Stein designated Clement Hurd to illustrate The World Is Round. Once more her amazing abilities were evident in the fact that although she spent a very short time with the sketches, she remembered every detail, “making very specific criticisms of my pictures,” said Hurd. “The only one I can remember after all these years is that she thought Rose looked too much like an American Indian, so I changed her to look more French.”

Hurd first saw the manuscript of The World Is Round in the fall of 1938. Following his designation as illustrator, he worked through the winter and into the spring. In late May 1939, he wrote to Stein:

136 East 70th Street

New York City

Friday May 26

Dear Miss Stein,

I am sorry that I have been so slow in sending you my pictures for your book but I have been working on them constantly so that I hated to send them off until I was satisfied with them myself.

I have loved Rose and Willie and your story since I first saw the manuscript last fall and I was very pleased when you let me do the illustrations for it.

I feel the responsibility profoundly of doing illustrations that will be worthy of your book. I do feel that an illustrator can only outdo himself when he really feels the challenge of a wonderful story. I hope I have carried out your suggestions about Rose. If only we could have had consultations at each step of the work I would be content. I have tried to subject the visual Rose to your charming characterization for the reader.

Hoping that my pictures will please you. It really means a great deal to me.

Sincerely,
Clement Hurd

From the farmhouse at Bilignin soon came an answer:

Bilignin
Par Belley
Ain

My Dear Hurd,

The pictures have just come and I am awfully pleased with them, I am delighted, the movement is lovely things float in them and are really there at the same time, the drum is very xciting, the night is charming and Rose and the bell is perfect and the green meadow and all that follows, there are only two that I do not quite like.

in the just then was it a pen and Rose embraces the chair,

I think Rose here is too large and the arms and legs look just a little naked and the emotion not clear, in all the rest the emotion is very clear and true.

Then in

The End of Billy the Lion,

I would suggest that the second lion should be more disappearing that is more of him disappeared than the one slightly ahead, I think the end of the lion should be more real. I am awfully really awfully pleased, I was a little doubtful in the beginning but now I am completely convinced that you are really illustrating it the way I wanted it done. The one of the is a lion not a lion is really perfect, thank you and thank you again for liking it so much and working so hard.

Always,
Gtde St

“French Rose” and Mexican Chihuahua, Pépé, at Bilignin, circa 1938.

The artist was overjoyed by Stein’s approval and wrote:

is my address—

Dear Miss Stein,

I was delighted to get your enthusiastic approval of my pictures. Your letter arrived a few days before my marriage so that it made a delightful wedding present, and I assure you it gave me great pleasure.

I am in New York to check on the printing of the books which is now under way. In spite of some delays it is going well and we have every hope that it will be entirely satisfactory. The pink is now all printed and I feel that it is just what I wanted as to color and weight. The blue starts being run tomorrow and I hope to get off for Vermont in a few days more. I trust therefore that you will shortly have the finished book in hand.

I have designed about six nursery rugs from the illustrations which W. & J. Sloane is having made up. . . .

I have enjoyed working on “The World Is Round” a great deal and feel more and more convinced that it is going to be an immediate and great success. . . .

With many thanks for your cooperation and approval.

Sincerely yours,
Clement Hurd

P.S. I should like very much to hear how you like the finished book, if you could write me a line. I will be at my farm for the rest of the summer.

The wedding he wrote of was also my own. Clem and I were married on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, June 24, 1939. Following the wedding we headed straight for New York, where Clem joined Bill Scott to supervise the printing of the book by the printer LeHuray, Clem being mostly concerned with the shades of pink and blue to be used. I remember that New York was ferociously hot that summer, and we were thankful to head north at last to our little farmhouse in Vermont for a belated honeymoon.

When Gertrude Stein received the first copies of The World Is Round, she wrote to her illustrator:

My dear Hurd,

The book has come and I am xcited and delighted by and with it, everything that you have changed makes it better and it is a lovely book, I took it over immediately to show it to the French Rose’s family and they were delighted as we were and xcited as we were, the rose is very lovely particularly at its palest and the blue of the rabbit sky is quite wonderful, in short we are terribly pleased and hope that everybody will like it almost as much. Do send me a photograph sometime of the rugs you have made, your arrangements are perfectly satisfactory and tell them as you suggest to send me the part of the royalty direct, perhaps lots of other things will happen and we will all enjoy them, and I am so pleased that it came as a wedding present and I hope it will go on being a wedding present always

Gtde St

IN the course of their correspondence, Gertrude Stein sent Clement Hurd a series of eight photographs of herself and Rose with the little dog Pépé and the big dog Love on the terrace of the farmhouse at Bilignin.

The rugs referred to were a series of round handhooked woolen rugs about thirty inches in diameter that Hurd had designed for W. & J. Sloane of New York. The designs were based upon the illustrations for The World Is Round. They were priced at $12.00 to $15.00. When a display was made of the rugs in the window at Sloane’s, Hurd sent a photograph to Stein.