Like Irish peat, this post has been growing, in my imagination, at the rate of a millimeter a year. Yesterday someone bought the book so it’s now or never.
Getting the back story on an older book is half the fun in the rare book business, occasionally it makes me not want to sell ia book at all, and it often makes me jack the price after I’ve built a bit of a relationship. I am happy to have this book sell to a person with a very Irish sounding name in a city known for its Irish history. Chicago is also the City of its editor’s ignominious death.
About one of this book’s editors I learned this: Clark Harris Slover was an American Scholar appointed a Guggenheim Fellow of Medieval Literature in 1925 for an investigation of the channels which were available for the transmission of literature and tradition from Ireland to Great Britain before the appearance of the Arthurian Romances, principally in the libraries of Ireland and Great Britain. But my remaining bits of infomation came from extracts here and there as Slover does not warrant a Wikipedia page of his own. I think he should, but here for your consideration are some great old pieces of writing.
In addition to the details of his untimely and violent death, I learned that in his college days, Slover excelled on the Gridiron as Captain off the Whitman College football team of 1914. That may not seem like much as Whitman is now a College of 1500 or so undergraduates.
However, the Whitman College Pioneer of November, 1914, a year before Carlisle College’s Jim Thorpe would join the Canton Bulldogs, laid it all out. The side from Walla Walla, looking ever so much like Red Grange, was set to finish out the season at home against the University of Idaho; they had already met Washington State, the University of Washington and the University of Oregon.
