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. But the work—half a century in the past—can still evoke the same hush of admiration or provoke the same hoots of derision that it did in the 1930s.

The World Is Round is Gertrude Stein for everyone—child and adult—providing that one is willing to relax certain prejudices and ignore the absence of certain conventions. I do not mean to imply that Stein will come across for all with the ease of The Little Engine That Could. Like most good writing, The World Is Round does not instantly yield its full meaning. It will have the reader returning again and again to ask some of the same questions Rose herself asks, “Well shall I go,” and to find some of the same answers Rose does, “Anything can happen while you are going up a hill. And a mountain is so much harder than a hill and still. Go on.”

In its publicity for the first edition Young Scott Books advised its readers that should they have difficulty in following the text, they might read faster, and that if they still had difficulty, they should read faster still. Today no such advice seems necessary. The core of meaning in the round songs and rhyming prose is more comprehensible than it was when the book was first published. Perhaps the electronic age, the age of television and the computer, has enabled us to move along the lines of thought with a speed of cognition that can keep up with the swift pace of this expatriate genius.

During the years at Bilignin Gertrude Stein achieved her greatest commercial success, but it was accompanied by a degree of self-doubt. After her first best seller, she developed a writer’s block, and throughout the 1930s a question of identity plagued her. “I am I because my little dog knows me” was her persistent observation. World War II was looming in the future, and in 1938 France was panicked with fear of a German invasion. Gertrude adamantly refused to believe that war could possibly occur and repeatedly said it would not, as if saying could make it so. She was sixty-five years old and did not like to contemplate a change from the good life at Bilignin or a return to America. As loudly as she proclaimed the virtue of being American in her writings, when she returned to California in her lecture tour of 1934, she had not been happy. Alice was elated by revisiting the scenes of her childhood and youth, but Gertrude was depressed by childhood memories when she saw Oakland again, the city about which she had made the remark, “There is no there there.”

Above all Gertrude Stein wanted to be there, just as Rose does.