Consequently, our sale has been steady and from perennial sources so that it looks to continue so for years.

There seems an increasing and spreading awareness that it is a great book and from all sides we hear reports of its effect on children. Miss Davis at the Public Library says that it has stimulated a great deal of children’s writing and she has a thick stack of pictures that it has provoked, particularly of the garden chair. The more it releases and relaxes others, the more it inhibits us with the heavy responsibility of having published a masterpiece.

When Gertrude Stein selected Clement Hurd to illustrate The World Is Round, he had barely begun his career as a book illustrator. Born and brought up in New York City, he graduated from Yale University in 1930. After a year at the Yale Architectural School, he went to Paris, where he studied painting in the studio of Fernand Léger.

The Depression ended Clement Hurd’s studies in 1933 and brought him back to New York to seek work as a freelance artist. Margaret Brown saw his murals for a bath house in Greenwich, Connecticut, that humorously depicted swimmers being attacked by smiling sharks and young ladies being pinched by happy men. To Margaret’s discerning eye they showed a clean, almost French style, well suited to book illustration. She suggested that he enter the field of children’s books.

Hurd and Brown started a collaboration that lasted many years. Their first effort, Bumble Bugs and Elephants, published by Scott Books in 1938, was termed by Lucy Sprague Mitchell as “the youngest book I have ever seen.” After spending three years of military duty in the South Pacific during the war, Hurd continued his work with Margaret Brown, and they completed the universal favorite, The Runaway Bunny, and the phenomenal bestseller, Goodnight, Moon. Hurd went on to produce books with other writers as well. After our marriage in 1939, Clem and I wrote and illustrated children’s books together for over forty years.

Long after The World Is Round disappeared from bookstores, the participants in the project felt they had been involved in something unusual and important. In 1965 Bill Scott and Clement Hurd were working together on another publication. One day over lunch Scott declared that of all the books he had issued, he thought that The World Is Round was the one most likely to become a permanent part of American literature. He said that if he had it to do again, he would ignore Stein’s suggestion of blue on pink and use conventional black ink for the type on white paper. Hurd observed that to him his illustrations had always seemed somewhat unfinished, and that were he able, he would do them differently, carrying them one step further. Together they decided a second edition was called for—with a new format, a different typeface, and new illustrations.

Hurd kept his original conception of the pictures but recut them in wood and linoleum blocks. Scott opened the space around the type, giving the pages a freer look. The book was bound in white cloth over boards, with pink end sheets very like the color used in the first edition. When the edition appeared in 1967, Hurd and Scott were gratified by the response. Ten thousand copies were sold. This is the edition most readers are familiar with.

Forty-five years have passed since The World Is Round first appeared, but it shows no signs of being forgotten. Each year it seems to gain new admirers. In 1984 Andrew Hoyem of the Arion Press approached Clement Hurd about participating in yet a third edition. Given the unusual formats in which some of his books are presented, I was not surprised when he told me, “We will, of course, make The World Is Round a round book.” But Hurd did not feel that he should execute a third set of pictures. He suggested instead that the Arion Press use the illustrations he had made for the second edition. Searching his archives, he found the original linoleum and wood blocks. These were proofed by the printers and, after some modification of the proofs by Andrew Hoyem in collaboration with the artist, they were made into photo-engravings. The images are full size as they were conceived and cut, rather than in the reduced form used in the trade book.

On learning of this new limited edition of The World Is Round, Bill Scott remarked, “Arion Press may find its edition is limited in more ways than one—limited to those who can understand Gertrude Stein.” It is amazing that nearly forty years after Stein’s death so many of the literate public still believe her to be incomprehensible. The image of the brilliant artist with the head of a Roman emperor, the constantly reported life, the endless anecdotes of her Paris salon, the daring and public liaison that made Alice B. Toklas her lifelong companion—these are the things everyone remembers. The legend is certainly persistent; she must have been among the first to use the media to her advantage.