Ellis Parker Butler (1869–1937)

Ellis Parker Butler (1869-1937) was a contemporary of many big names in American fiction straddling the 19th and 20th centuries, but today he's almost completely forgotten. (Maybe that's because he was only a part-time writer with a day-job as a banker. His short bios at the University of Iowa Press and Des Moines Register are worth checking.)

This is the second book by Butler that I've read in the last month or so. I liked it better than the previous one and you might, too, in part because show more it contains no bothersome racial/ethnic stereotypes that might be objectionable for many modern readers. (Or at least none that I noticed.) And the humor in this one holds up pretty well; it's quite middle-American. It was originally published in 1907, but I read the Project Gutenberg e-book edition.

The plot centers around Eliph' Hewlitt, a travelling book salesman of the horse-and-buggy era, who is constantly pitching Jarby's Encyclopedia of Knowledge and Compendium of Literature, Science, Art, which is a thick, single-volume storehouse containing everything, as you can imagine. He arrives in Kilo, Iowa, during a church picnic and promptly runs across the girl of his dreams, Sally Briggs. He decides on the spot to marry her, and settles down in Kilo, peddling books to the locals. But Sally will have nothing to do with book agents, in part because she still owes for a previous edition of five volumes and can't get any more money from her cantankerous father for such frivolous items, so she avoids Eliph' assiduously...

The comic adventure involves a lot of fire-extinguishers, local graft, the newspaper printer, and various other people of importance in the tiny town. Along the way, we meet several amusing individuals to whom Eliph' is trying to sell his one-volume encyclopedia. My favorite vignette is a longish conversation about reincarnation and marriage and all that, between Hewlitt and the doctor's wife. show less

I love guinea pigs and hate the ubiquitous red tape that the world runs on, so I greatly enjoyed this short story. It really was ludicrous but it was lots of fun and had me laughing out loud.

A lot of humor doesn't age very well, but this one does alright, at least in my opinion. The book is rather lightly funny the whole way through, and the humor is pretty much unobjectionable, even more than a hundred years later. (E.g., there is essentially no type-derogation, racial humor, high-handed misogyny, etcetera, except for some linguistic comments about a Polish maid near the end.) The subjects of humor in this book are mostly the two neighbors' opposing opinions about all aspects show more of domestic and rural life, the gardening, and a variety of slapstick troubles with an automobile.

The narrator's wife, Isobel, has never lived anywhere but in an urban flat with people on either side, above, and below. When they move into a stand-alone house in the 'burbs (on Long Island not too far outside the city) she feels insecure with only two neighbors on either side, until her husband reminds her that far below there are people living in China; and then they obtain a live-in garden-loving boarder named Prawley to occupy the attic. (And that's an oddly surreal one, too: sort of a Schrödinger's Boarder... If you read it you'll understand.)

The narrator sets out to get a horse for the buggy, and that's an adventure in itself. In 1911 automobiles were a pretty new thing, and this book tells us all about the kinds of troubles they caused for their owners. But the neighbor Millington has an automobile, and however many times the pair of men and their wives bundle into the machine and prepare for an eleven mile journey to Port Lafayette, they never seem to get there. Typically, Millington will have car trouble of one kind or another, and he may crank it for half an hour before giving up. The ladies may get out and go shopping elsewhere, then come back later to help push the vehicle back to the garage. Later on, there's quite a hoopla about other things that can be done with an automobile.

The neighbors advise John and Isobel to get chickens (because they want to share in the eggs, of course), but Millington and Rolfs have opposing opinions about the proper kind of hen to raise and where to put the coop. Isobel is dead set against chickens, then gets a little dismayed soon thereafter when she orders a roaster from the local store and gets delivered a live hen. Of course they can't eat her, so the narrator has to build a chicken coop. Next comes the pig idea with grand plans for clean pig-raising, but apparently one can't legally keep pigs where they live...

The book is illustrated with a number of black-and-white plates, many of which employ what used to be called "trick photography". I.e., they have been physically altered for comic effect with what I'm sure was painstaking effort at the time.

The book is pretty short, a mere 13 chapters, so it's a nice one to tuck into your device for spare-time reading. I enjoyed the Project Gutenberg EPUB, which was made from the Doubleday edition of 1911, available here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44153 show less

This is a moderately amusing book most of the way through. I wouldn't say it's wildly funny, but it held my interest. Much of the humor is low-key and rather dated. (The book was originally published in 1913; I read the Project Gutenberg EPUB version, based on a 1918 reprint.) Some of the humor, as common for the period, relies on racial and socio-economic stereotypes that are, at best, "questionable" these days, so that might be a consideration for many people when reading it in 2014. The show more book doesn't stand up to the ages as well as Sherlock Holmes does, but it's amusing enough. The narrative is a series of brief cases with an over-arching connection and temporal progression. The title character, Philo Gubb, is a wall-paper hanger by profession, but he graduated from a correspondence school for detection, hence the title. He's one of those bumbling detectives, of stereotypical appearance himself, who mostly solves his cases by dumb luck or fortuitous circumstances. show less