The Wit and Humor of America, Wilder, 8 of 10 Volumes, c. 1911–1920

The Set

Eight volumes of The Wit and Humor of America, edited by Marshall P. Wilder, published by Funk and Wagnalls Company, New York and London. Small octavos in ribbed cloth, once a deep brick red and now faded across every board to a warm terracotta, close to the color of unglazed clay. The spines carry the title, the volume numeral and a small gilt device at the tail, all of it worn down to a ghost of itself. Top edges stained.

Present are volumes I, II, III, IV, VI, VIII, IX and X. Volumes V and VII are not here. This is eight of a set of ten and is sold as such.

Each volume opens with a frontispiece portrait of an American humorist, drawn rather than photographed, printed on coated stock and captioned. Volume I has Marshall Wilder himself, chin on fist over an open book, drawn by R. F. Leppert in 1908. Volume II has James Whitcomb Riley in sharp profile by John Cecil Clay, dated 1903. Volume IV has Joel Chandler Harris in a soft black hat, after a photograph. Volume VI has Finley Peter Dunne, the creator of Mr. Dooley. Volume VIII has Robert J. Burdette. The title pages carry the Funk and Wagnalls device of two figures seated on a plinth with an open book.

The contents are the full roll call of nineteenth century American humor, alphabetized by title in each volume. Mark Twain's contemporaries and rivals: Bret Harte, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Joel Chandler Harris, Finley Peter Dunne, Bill Nye, Josh Billings, Petroleum V. Nasby, George Ade, Eugene Field, Gelett Burgess, Carolyn Wells, John Kendrick Bangs, Charles Dudley Warner, Owen Wister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, Walt Whitman, Emerson Hough, John Philip Sousa and Lloyd Osbourne. Ernest Lawrence Thayer's Casey at the Bat sits in volume VI at page 181.

Every volume carries the same ownership inscription on the front free endpaper, in the same hand: a surname and a street number, Dickerson, 329 Indiana. No city is given. One person owned the whole run and marked each book the same way.

History & Provenance

Marshall Pinckney Wilder was born in Geneva, New York in September 1859 and died in St. Paul in January 1915. He had dwarfism and kyphosis, and he built one of the most successful comic careers of his era out of a world that offered him very little. He started by performing humorous monologues in the drawing rooms of wealthy New Yorkers for fifty cents a night. He turned down P. T. Barnum, who wanted him as a sideshow attraction, and went after the legitimate stage instead. In 1883 he went to London and became a favorite of the royal family; Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, attended nearly twenty of his performances. He joined The Lambs in 1888, moved into vaudeville, toured the world in 1904, appeared in films from 1897, and wrote The People I've Smiled With, The Sunnyside of the Street and Smiling Around the World. Editing this anthology was the work of a man who had spent thirty years learning what makes Americans laugh.

The copyright page in each volume reads Copyright 1907 by Bobbs-Merrill Company and Copyright 1911 by The Thwing Company, with no printing date. The anthology was first issued by Bobbs-Merrill in 1907 and reissued under the Funk and Wagnalls imprint after the 1911 Thwing copyright. That 1911 date is a hard floor and nothing more; Funk and Wagnalls kept the set in print, so the upper end of the date range given here is an estimate rather than a fact.

One thing a buyer should know before opening them. This is American humor as it was published in 1907, and a portion of it is written in heavy dialect, including pieces that caricature Black, immigrant and rural speakers in terms that are offensive by any modern standard. Titles like Aunt Dinah's Kitchen and Go Lightly, Gal appear in the contents. The set is offered as a period document and as a decorative run, not as a book to hand to a child.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Eight matching spines in faded terracotta is the point. That color does not exist on a modern shelf, and it does not exist on most antique ones either, because it is not a color anyone chose. It is brick red cloth that spent decades in a bright room, and the fading is even enough across all eight that they read as a deliberate run rather than a pile of orphans. Set against plaster, oak, brass or dark paint, they do what designers actually buy old books for.

They are also fourteen inches of shelf that happens to be real. This is not a box of color-sorted filler with the titles turned in. It is a named anthology, edited by a man worth knowing about, carrying the first-rank American humorists of the generation that made Twain possible, with a portrait at the front of every volume and Casey at the Bat in the sixth.

Two volumes are gone and the cloth is tired, which is exactly why a set like this is affordable at all. Buy it for a library shelf, the top of a cabinet, a stack under a lamp, or a bookcase styled by color, and let the one previous owner's name on eight endpapers do the rest.