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  • Olive Beaupré Miller's My Book House:From William Morris to Modernism Under One Roof
  • Rennie Mapp (bio)

Across the page of Olive Beaupré Miller's 1920 poem "City Smoke," the fumes from urban chimneys drift in three modes: lexical, typographical, and pictorial. As a poem in the Imagist style, the semantic meaning of "City Smoke" depends characteristically on lexical precision and economical metaphor: the smoke "Climbs high/the drifting/ladder/of the/wind."1 As a visual poem, its meaning depends on its typographic drift of word-rungs arranged, ladder-like, to represent smoke drifting in swaths. As part of a visual and textual collage of the entire page, the poem's typography rhymes spatially with its illustration's diagonally striated smoke, presenting a single pictorial unit (fig. 1). Beyond these three modes, the poem's meaning is also generated relationally, through its placement as the recto page opposite the final (verso) page of a short story, "A Happy Day in the City."2

This story is also by Beaupré Miller,3 and both story and poem appear in the first volume of My Book House, the six-volume anthology of children's literature she edited, published, and distributed, encased in a wooden house.4 In a free indirect style, "A Happy Day in the City" narrates a visit to Chicago from the point of view of Ned, a suburban child, who perceives that "All the buildings they passed, as they walked along downtown, seemed turned a soft pearly gray by the city smoke;" and that "a tangled mass of automobiles and wagons and trolley cars," initially incoherent in appearance, turns out to be "very orderly after all" when the policeman blows his whistle.5 An illustration depicts Ned with his cousin and their mothers on a Chicago street, framed by monolithic columns, with shop fronts behind [End Page 543]


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Fig. 1.

"City Smoke" by Olive Beaupre Miller, vol. 1 of My Book House, p. 417.

them and smokestacks emitting drifting smoke above all (fig. 2).6 In "A Happy Day in the City," the chaotic experiences of the modern city streets and industry are textually softened by the "pearly gray" of the smoke, pictorially contained by a frame of classical architecture, and humanized by the illustrated forms of the elegantly dressed mothers and their endearingly outfitted children. In relation to "A Happy Day," the poem "City Smoke" is more modernist in its free-verse, Imagist form. Its appearance in a children's anthology, however, especially as epilogue to a story that seems bent on taming and [End Page 544] reducing the modern roar and turmoil of Chicago, must give pause to any interpretative move that would locate Beaupré Miller as a modernist alongside Chicago's early twentieth-century avant-garde. Yet this essay undertakes to do just that: place not only Beaupré Miller's "City Smoke" but also her entire anthology of children's literature within the cultural networks of modernist Chicago in the 1920s.


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Fig. 2.

"A Happy Day in the City" by Olive Beaupre Miller, vol. 1, p. 396.

This argument rests, first, on a hitherto unacknowledged connection between William Morris and Olive Beaupré Miller, an intersection of late nineteenth-century [End Page 545] Kelmscott Press innovation and early twentieth-century Chicago publishing. While scholarship has established Morris's crucial contributions to modernism, especially modernism in Chicago, I demonstrate that My Book House in particular is structured according to book design principles developed by William Morris. A Smith-educated Midwesterner and Chicago-based publisher, Beaupré Miller's typographic and design decisions for My Book House, together with her choice and juxtapositions of stories, poems, biographies and images, depend on important continuities with Morris's conception of the book as architecture. More importantly, her domestic metaphor of the anthology as a "book house" emphasizes spatial, tactile and corporal aspects of reading in a way that parallels Morris's influence on modernism more generally.

My argument that Beaupré Miller's work fits into the cultural networks of Chicago modernism is based not only on evidence of her familiarity with Morris' design aesthetics but also...

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