Getting away with it

Researching an old quotation in Google Books, I came across this clever LIFE  magazine cover from 101 years ago. I’ll just say “Wow!” and leave it at that.

LIFE: Liars’ Number, 1922 February 23rd, digitized by Google, books.google.com

What a find!

I came across this excellent website, the Wellcome Collection. It is a free museum and library in London which creates “opportunities for people to think deeply about the connections between science, medicine, life and art.” Among other fascinating content, I found some beautiful — and free! — public domain images in their digitized collections. Below are some examples.

The anatomy of a horse by Andrew Snape, 1687

Fruiting fungus (Stropharia aeruginosa)
watercolour, 1883 — modified t.g.

Florence Nightingale
line engraving by W. Wellstood, 1856,
after J. B. Wandesforde — cropped t.g.

A rose with lettering. Coloured cut
paper work with letterpress, 1800s.

Skeletons dancing. Etching by R. Stamper
after C. Sharp, 1700s — modified t.g.

A skeleton in fine attire.
Lithograph, 1800s — modified t.g.

L’art de connaître les hommes par la physionomie.
M. Moreau, 1806–1809

A rose (Rosa species): flowering stem and
cut flower. Watercolour — modified t.g.

A young man sits reading ledgers at his desk
wearing spectacles and an eyeshade. Wood engraving
after A. Oberländer — modified t.g.

Mr Brault’s hidden treasures

If you’ve spent much time at all on The Quote Garden, you’ll have noticed that one of my most frequently quoted authors is Robert Brault. I’m grateful that he allows me to freely post his extensive wit and wisdom in my collection. He publishes many of his writings to his blog, The New Robert Brault Reader, but did you know that he has also published books in which you can find some new material that isn’t posted online? Below is a summary of his six books. Follow the links for more information and to purchase online or to request inscribed, signed copies from Mr Brault directly.


Round Up The Usual Subjects
published 2014
a thousand original thoughts from his first blog which is no longer accessible on the internet

The Second Collection
published 2015
700 quotations, plus humor pieces, personal vignettes, and longer poems

Short Thoughts For The Long Haul
published 2017
the signature collection of Robert Brault quotes, an anthology of 1200+ favorites from his first two books and from the original quotes-only edition of the Reflections book

Thoughts On Art & Artists
published 2019
original insights into the world of art and artists, enhanced by his wife Joan Brault’s beautiful artwork, 75 pages

Reflections: Expanded Edition
published 2019
the most diverse collection of Mr Brault’s writings and his own personal favorite book, it includes not only quotations but also essays, reminiscences, and selected correspondence

A Few For The Road
published 2021
recent writings from 2020–2021, and about a third of this 131‑page book is new material, including some verse

Image information:  book cover detail from Reflections: Expanded Edition, a watercolor titled “Fall Pond” painted by the author’s wife, Joan Brault

Who Is W. Dayton Wegefarth?

There isn’t a bio on the Web for author W. Dayton Wegefarth, so I’ve done some research and pieced together a little something from various sources.

William Dayton Wegefarth was born 1885 September 10th in New York to Gustavus Wegefarth and Rebecca Janet Cox. In 1919, he married Estelle Buxbaum (1882–1950) in Philadelphia.

Mr Wegefarth wrote for newspapers and magazines and was quite successful as a writer of verses for greeting cards. He also worked in the theatrical field, at theatres in Philadelphia and New York. He wrote lyrics and music as well as managing bookings.

His published books:  Smiles and Sighs — 1910, poems; The True Story of “Bum” — 1915, short story about a stray dog he adopted; and Rainbow Verse — 1919, inspirational poetry. As with many writers of the day, the book verses were mostly reprinted items from periodicals, such as Lippincott’s Magazine.

He published under his real name as well as a pseudonym, Hugh Barrington. His name variations were:  W. Dayton Wegefarth, William Dayton Wegefarth, W. D. Wegefarth, and William D. Wegefarth. His surname has sometimes been misspelled as Wedgefarth, Wedgeforth, and Wegeforth.

He passed away 1973, in New York.

I’ve got a few dozen excerpts from this cheerful author’s public domain works posted to various pages of The Quote Garden.

Sources:  The Book News Monthly, Google Books, Internet Archive, Carrie Jacobs–Bond & Son, George W. Jacobs & Company, Sully and Kleinteich, Harvard University, HathiTrust Digital Library, Ancestry, Seeking My Roots, Teller Family in America, Illinois University Library, National Library of Ireland, Newspapers.com

Images:  Book News Monthly, 1914 & 1915, and Rainbow Verse, 1919, scanned by Google Books, modified t.g.; letter to Joseph McGarrity, 1916, courtesy National Library of Ireland

A letter to 2021 New York, from Christopher Morley, 1921

“To a New Yorker a Hundred Years Hence”
essay by Christopher Morley, 1921
illustration by Walter Jack Duncan, 1923

I wonder, old dear, why my mind has lately been going out towards you? I wonder if you will ever read this? They say that wood-pulp paper doesn’t last long nowadays. But perhaps some of my grandchildren (with any luck, there should be some born, say twenty-five years hence) may, in their years of tottering caducity, come across this scrap of greeting, yellowed with age. With tenderly cynical waggings of their faded polls, perhaps they will think back to the tradition of the quaint vanished creatures who lived and strove in this city in the year of disgrace, 1921...

You seem a long way off, this soft September morning as I sit here and sneeze (will hay fever still exist in 2021, I wonder?) and listen to the chime of St. Paul’s ring eleven. Just south of St. Paul’s brown spire the girders of a great building are going up. Will that building be there when you read this? What will be the Olympian skyline of your city?... Will you look up, as I do now, to the great pale shaft of Woolworth; to the golden boy with wings above Fulton Street? What ships with new names will come slowly and grandly up your harbour? What new green spaces will your street children enjoy? But something of the city we now love will still abide, I hope, to link our days with yours...

New stones, new steeples are comely things; but the human heart clings to places that hold association and reminiscence. That, I suppose, is the obscure cause of this queer feeling that impels me to send you so perishable a message. It is the precious unity of mankind in all ages, the compassion and love felt by the understanding spirit for those, its resting kinsmen, who once were glad and miserable in these same scenes. It keeps one aware of that marvellous dark river of human life that runs, down and down uncountably, to the unexplored sea of Time.

You seem a long way off, I say — and yet it is but an instant, and you will be here. Do you know that feeling, I wonder (so characteristic of our city) that a man has in an elevator bound (let us say) for the eighteenth floor? He sees 5 and 6 and 7 flit by, and he wonders how he can ever live through the interminable time that must elapse before he will get to his stopping place and be about the task of the moment. It is only a few seconds, but his mind can evolve a whole honeycomb of mysteries in that flash of dragging time. Then the door slides open before him and that instantaneous eternity is gone; he is in a new era... Before we have time to turn three times in our chairs, we shall be the grandparents and you will be smiling at our old-fashioned sentiments.

But we ask you to look kindly on this our city of wonder, the city of amazing beauties which is also (to any man of quick imagination) an actual hell of haste, din, and dishevelment. Perhaps you by this time will have brought back something of that serenity, that reverence for thoughtful things, which our generation lost — and hardly knew it had lost. But even Hell, you must admit, has always had its patriots...

And how we loved this strange, mad city of ours, which we knew in our hearts was, to the clear eye of reason and the pure, sane vision of poetry, a bedlam of magical impertinence, a blind byway of monstrous wretchedness. And yet the blacker it seemed to the lamp of the spirit, the more we loved it with the troubled eye of flesh. For humanity, immortal only in misery and mockery, loves the very tangles in which it has enmeshed itself: with good reason, for they are the mark and sign of its being.

So you will fail, as we have; and you will laugh, as we have — but not so heartily, we insist; no one has ever laughed the way your tremulous granfers did, old chap! And you will go on about your business, as we did, and be just as certain that you and your concerns are the very climax of human gravity and worth. And will it be any pleasure to you to know that on a soft September morning a hundred years ago your affectionate great-grandsire looked cheerfully out of his lofty kennel window, blew a whiff of smoke, smiled a trifle gravely upon the familiar panorama, knew (with that antique shrewdness of his) a hawk from a handsaw, and then went out to lunch?

—Christopher Morley (1890–1957), “To a New Yorker a Hundred Years Hence,” 1921, as reprinted in The Powder of Sympathy, 1923, illustrated by Walter Jack Duncan (1881-1941), Doubleday, Page & Company, New York

What I do

“I read a book and pick out the quotes.”
altered prose by Terri Guillemets, 2019
from The Man Who Loved Jane Austen
by Sally Smith O'Rourke, 2001, page 53

Who Is Gerald Raftery?

There isn’t a bio online for author Gerald Raftery, so I’ve done lots of digging and have pieced together this brief biography from dozens of sources.

Gerald Raftery, 1929
Source: Seton Hall Yearbook

Overview.  Gerald “Jerry” Bransfield Raftery was a poet, teacher, librarian, and author. He was born October 30th 1905 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and died in Vermont on August 26th 1986. He wrote poems, articles, books, and even a bit of music, and was known mostly for his children’s fiction and for light verse in periodicals. His books for youth were animal-themed, or academic mysteries. One reviewer called his style “warm and wryly humorous,” and a journal editor described him as having “a penchant for the controversial or the offbeat.”

Childhood & College Years.  Gerald was the son of Timothy E. Raftery and Mary C. Bransfield Raftery. His hobbies since boyhood were “tramping and camping.” He became a published poet while still in school, in various newspapers and magazines; his college annual called him a “budding poet” although still yet a “poetaster” and declared confidence in his literary fruition. At Seton Hall University (class of 1929), Gerald was on the yearbook staff, the school newspaper editorial staff, and he participated in Dramatics and the debate club. He was a graduate of not only Seton Hall but also NYU and Columbia (School of Library Service). During college he worked as a farm hand, laborer, salesman, waiter, clerk, and bank runner.

Teacher & Librarian.  Raftery began teaching in 1930 in his hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey. His teaching career was interrupted for three years while he served as an Army intelligence specialist in Europe in World War II. He became a librarian at Lafayette Junior High School, New Jersey, in 1947. While there he helped craft a school policy for the handling of controversial issues and wrote many pieces about the life of a school librarian and his teenage students.

Vermont.  In 1966 Gerald moved with his wife Eleanor Murnin (m. 1933) to Sunderland, Vermont. He wrote a column for the Bennington Banner and was librarian at the Martha Canfield Memorial Library in Arlington, transitioning after 16 years to president of the library board. The license plate on his car read: BOOKY. Eleanor passed away two years prior to Gerald, in 1984.

Brother.  Gerald’s brother, Paul Philip Raftery (1908–2003), also wrote poetry and humor. He attended Seton Hall as well, and then law school. After working in the mayor’s office in Chicago, he retired to Vermont. He was a lifelong reader of poetry.

Family History.  “Gerald Raftery is carrying on a famous poetical tradition. His great-grand-uncle was Anthony Raftery, the blind Irish minstrel who wandered the length of Eire, singing the verses he composed. Donn Byrne immortalized the poet in his Blind Raftery” (The Irish Book Lover, 1938). “In defense of the Raftery clan I’d like to point out that Sergeant R. is not necessarily a typical representative of our group. Anthony Raftery, a Gaelic poet who flourished some 150 years ago, not only punished his fair share of poteen but was probably the only blind horse thief in the history of Ireland, and certainly the only one to celebrate his transgressions in poetry” (Gerald Raftery, in The Saturday Evening Post, 1959).

Publications & Writing.  Mr Raftery’s published books include: Gray Lance (1950, wolf), Snow Cloud (1951, horse), Copperhead Hollow (1952, youth earth science mystery), City Dog (1953), Twenty-Dollar Horse (1955), Slaver’s Gold (1966, youth cryptogram mystery), and The Natives Are Always Restless (1964, compilation of his junior high school library articles). In Twenty-Dollar Horse, Raftery addressed the issues of race relations and racial discrimination. His poems were published in New York World, Newark Evening News, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Sun, Harper’s Magazine, The Forge, and several other periodicals beginning in the 1920s; unfortunately, there is no compilation. His articles appeared in The New York Herald Tribune, The Clearing House, The Wilson Library Bulletin, Library Journal, and various education journals and magazines. His column for The Bennington Banner was titled “If I May Say So.” His books didn’t always get the best reviews, and in Gerald’s own words about his poetry, “I was admittedly a third-rater, although there were some kind critics who insisted that I was really second rate” (1974).

Name.  Mr Raftery’s surname was sometimes misspelled in publications and once even by his own publisher, as Gerald Raferty. His name variations: Gerald B. Raftery, Gerald Bransfield Raftery, Jerry Raftery

One-Quote Wonder.  Raftery’s sole modern claim to fame — a quotation all over the internet “A horse loves freedom, and the weariest old work horse will roll on the ground or break into a lumbering gallop when he is turned loose into the open” — is widely posted under the Raferty misspelling.* After hours and hours of reading, I've tracked down this quotation to his novel Snow Cloud. The correct wording is “when he is turned loose in the open.” In archived items from Google Books and the Internet Archive, Raftery ceases to exist past 1964 except for one poem — “Apartment House” — which survived in some textbooks until the mid-1980s. Some of his Banner columns are referenced in newspaper archive sites up until the late 1970s or early 1980s. Unfortunately, it seems he was all but forgotten 3–4 decades ago.

* I take partial blame for spread of the misspelling. I posted the horse freedom quote to The Quote Garden in 2001 copied from a book about horses in which his name was already misspelled. So I transferred the error from a secondhand print source to inadvertently facilitate its existence throughout all of eternity on the interwebs — as of the date of this blog post, only two public sites other than mine have the correct wording and name spelling, and there are 81,500 with incorrect information. I still feel bad about that old mistake; fortunately, I’ve long since changed my ways. In one of Raftery’s columns about poetry he wrote “Once a piece gets into the anthology circuit, apparently it goes on and on because anthologists just copy from other anthologies” (1974). So true. Which is, by the by, how it spread past my own site. Apologies to Mr Raftery and the world.

Update, April 2020:  Updated article to include Raftery’s branch of military, year of marriage, year of move to VT, license plate, place of death, and his wife’s name and year of death.