The World Is Round Read Online

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. At that time he also designed a collection of wallpapers based upon the pictures for Katzenbach and Warren of New York.

Bilignin
Par Belley
Ain

My dear Clement Hurd,

I am awfully pleased about the wall paper, once we did very good wall paper of the pigeons on the grass and we have it in two rooms in Paris and it would be lovely to have another with the World is Round, and the rugs, the window sounds perfectly ravishing and everybody has been so xcited about the ad in the New Yorker, that they all send me a copy, I cannot tell you how pleased I am about it all, and your business arrangements are perfectly satisfactory. It may be that we will come over in the early spring, nothing of course is certain but it is possible and it will then be a very great pleasure our meeting, it would be fun too if they filmed us, it would be fun and lucrative and most xciting, we are living peacefully here in the country, and I am working a lot, so once more to the pleasure of meeting either there or here, always

Gtde St

Of course we were very excited at the prospect of meeting Gertrude Stein, but by 1940 the war had already begun in Europe, and with the attack on Pearl Harbor and the entrance of the United States into the conflict, our hopes were dashed. Neither the Scotts, John McCullough, nor my husband and I were ever to meet the famous expatriate.

Clement Hurd’s rugs displayed at W. & J. Sloane, New York, 1939.

A fragment of the wallpaper designed by Clement Hurd for Katzenbach and Warren, New York, 1940.

Two other letters from Gertrude Stein rounded out the exchange between her and Clement Hurd.

Bilignin
Par Belley
Ain

My dear Hurd,

You will be pleased that the first child who has told me about our book is a little French boy six years old the son of a captain in the Army and our proprietor, I gave them the book not thinking as none of them read English that it would be anything but a souvenir. But I saw little Francis and much xcited he said to me tell me more about Rose and the mountain and Willy and the Lion, I said how did you know about them it would seem that he was mad about the illustrations and a friend who read English came in and told him the stories, and he adores the book, he says he would like another one by us about not wild animals mts., but about poplar trees and birds and rabbits and deer and gazelle and if we wanted to a wild boar, a big one or a little one I asked him, a medium sized one he said. And when I told him that there was wall paper to be of it his eyes just grew large and round, do send me a bit of it so that I can see what it looks like, it looks as if it would be a double happy New Year to you and Mrs. Hurd now and always

Gtde St

[Postmarked Ain]

My dear Clement Hurd,

I have just received the samples of the wall paper and we are all delighted with them we took them over to Beau[?] where Rose lives and the family were enchanted, I am not sure I do not like the blue one best but then when I say that I look at the other and am not sure, if they do a room of it and with the rugs you have a photograph of it do send it to me. How are the rugs selling, I have heard nothing about the Christmas sale, have you, and now have you heard of the new children’s book that I am doing, I might say have done, because it is pretty nearly finished, it is a book about Alphabets and birthdays, a lot of little stories to illustrate it and I want it sombre and xciting, the way Gustave Doré’s illustrations were to me when I was a child, I suggested that the book be done in black and gold gold paper and black print or the other way, but perhaps you could think of a combination of colors that would be more sombre and xciting, all this of course, if McCullough likes the book and if you are to do the illustrations, I do not mind if you make it even a little frightening, well anyway I will be sending the ms. along in about ten days now and I hope you will like it

Always
Gtde St

THEIR delightful correspondence now resides in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Throughout these letters from Bilignin, Gertrude Stein showed herself to be a most sensitive and appreciative person whose writing style in a letter has the intimacy and immediacy of conversation.

It was Stein’s reputation for unintelligibility that caused an outcry of disbelief when in the spring of 1939 Young Scott Books announced that it would publish a children’s book by her. Some commentators sharpened their stilettos and attacked with the skepticism they held in reserve for such a production. “The book will have a social will have a social will have a social aspect in as much as it is being published by William R. Scott,” stuttered one, digging at both author and publisher. Another, attempting cleverness, burbled “Gertrude Stein is writing is writing is writing a new Gertrude Stein a new book is writing is writing Gertrude a new a new a new. . . .” In a short piece entitled “Stein Song” the New York Post stuffily editorialized that “Gertrude Stein has written a story for children called The World Is Round. However, the book may be expected to prove the world is square, since she is the same Gertrude Stein who wrote Four Saints in Three Acts.”

When the book appeared in the fall of 1939, the negative reviews minced no words.