Me an' Methuselar and Other Episodes

The Peter Paul Book Company, 1895. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. Hardcover, 1895, 84 pages. Previous owner's names to front free endpaper in pencil. Frontispiece author photo and tissue guard in good order. Full bound green boards with black designs and lettering to front and spine. Spine is very slightly darkened. Binding solid and square. A review in The Literary World vol XXVI 1895 dscribes the author as a young writer from New England and a student of drama who studied in Boston and New York; her monologues were performed around the world and in the White House, and were collected as "Me an' Methuselar and Other Episodes". The present copy is in Very Good condition. The second piece, "At the Photographer's", has the following written in pencil "March 1896 / Recited by Miss Minerva N Naylor / from Mrs Edna Chaffee Noble's Training School of Elocution and English Literature", and on the following page "Given by Minerva N Naylor at Contest - April 15 '96. Also at N.A.E. Convention June '96 on Steamer 'Pleasure'". The piece has marginalia in pencil related Miss Naylor's reading - inflection marks, modified/added text, dramatic cues (Old lady, Irish, Dignified, Crying, etc). Edna Chaffee Noble was a pioneering American educator and speaker, and is well remembered for demanding - and receiving - a man's salary for running the village school in her hometown of Rochester, VT. She was chair of Oratory in the St Lawrence University before founding her Training School of Elocution and English Literature in Detroit in 1878, the first and one of the most successful ventures of its kind.