Hubbard

HUBBARD, ELBERT (June 19, i8s6-May
7, 1915), author, editor, master-craftsman, de-
scended from George Hubbard who was living in
Hartford, Conn., in 1639, was born in Blooming-
ton, 111., the son of Silas Hubbard, a physician,
and his wife, Juliana Frances Read. Named by
his parents Elbert Green, he dropped the middle
name when he became an author. At the age of
sixteen, he went to Chicago and for four years
was in free-lance connection with the newspapers
of the city. In 1880 he took a position with a
manufacturing company at Buffalo, N. Y,, and
for the next fifteen years was connected with its
sales and advertising activities. He introduced
here methods which have been widely used in
stimulating sales by extension of credit and
awarding of premiums, methods which he suc-
cessfully employed later in the circulation of his
own magazines. On June 30, 1881, he was mar-
ried to Bertha C. Crawford. In 1883 he moved
to East Aurora, a Buffalo suburb. In 1892 he re-
tired from business with modest resources, and
decided at the age of thirty-nine to go through
a regular undergraduate course at Harvard. He
was too mature to submit to a routine devised
for boys, however, and soon abandoned the proj-
ect. A more vital educational experience was his
trip abroad in this year when he visited and fell
under the influence of William Morris. On his
return he entered the office of the Arena Publish-
ing Company in Boston, through which his first
two novels, One Day: A Tale of the Prairies
(1893) and Forbes of Harvard (1894), were
published, together with two essays in the mag-
azine, The Arena, in 1894. In the latter year, a
New York house published for him his third
and last novel, No Enemy (But Himself), and in
January of 1894 *^e ^rs* °^ ^s Little Journeys,
the pamphlet on George Eliot.

In 1895, stimulated by the example of William
Morris, he founded at East Aurora the Roycroft
Shop, named after the seventeenth-century Eng-
lish printers, Thomas and Samuel Roycroft In
June of this year he published, in a form which
was later to become very familiar, the first num-
ber of The Philistine, issued in a spirit of experi-
ment and challenge without thought of any per-
manent future policy. The 2,500 copies which he
distributed among authors and publishing houses
brought responses which stimulated the issue of
a second number in July. For a while he worked
with the assistance of contributors, but with the
forty-fifth issue, January 1899, ^e announced
that thereafter he himself would write every-
thing in the periodical including advertisements
and testimonials of Roycroft books. Circulation
increased steadily, and according to the an-

il ubbard

nouncement on the last issue before his death in
1915, the number that went to press was 225,000.
The Philistine had become so completely his own
utterance that it was discontinued with the issue
of July 1915. It had been only the beginning of
his editorial activities; in April 1908 he started
the publication of The Fra, a less personal pe-
riodical which, however, was also discontinued
after his death (August 1917). His Little Jour-
neys, issued monthly, aggregated 170, and are
published in fourteen volumes.

He was the controlling spirit in the Roycroft
Shops, with ultimately a working force of over
500. To the Roycroft Inn picturesque visitors
came singly, and in numbers to the annual con-
ventions which were gay interchanges of miscel-
laneous opinion. For the last fifteen years of his
life Hubbard was on the road lecturing much of
the time from May to September annually; and
in one of these years he even invaded the vaude-
ville stage, more to his monetary than to his ar-
tistic satisfaction. His gifts as an administrator
and as a writer were in no small degree indebted
to his engaging and magnetic personality, an
asset which he did not hesitate to exploit. He ab-
jured the conventional stiffness of men's dress
and with his wide-brimmed soft hat, luxuriant
hair, and flowing tie, he challenged attention
wherever he went. From his lectures his auditors
carried away rather more a sense of contact with
an individual than the memory of his formal dis-
course ; and similarly the readers of The Philis-
tine gathered from the substance of what he
wrote, the breezy and sometimes recklessly in-
formal style, and the format of the magazine with
its rough paper cover and its characteristic type-
font, a feeling of having received a personal mes-
sage in the continuance of a periodic corre-
spondence.

Although regarded with suspicion as a near-
radical, he was in fact a distinct conservative in
his economic views. His Message to Garcia of
1899 w&s written in the mood of an impatient
employer wearied at the inefficiency of his hire-
lings. It was eagerly snapped up by industrial
magnates and was printed under various auspices
and in various languages, giving currency for
the probably unverifiable statement that its ag-
gregate circulation reached 40,000,000. A char-
acteristic collection of his efficiency utterances
is the posthumous booklet called Loydty in Busi-
ness (copyrighted 1921) of which an edition of
5,000 was circulated by the officials of one of
the well-known schools of commerce. Hubbard
was early in the modern succession of American
authors who broke away from the conventions
of traditional polite literature and wrote iofor-

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