“Can’t afford them.”
“How about my making an inducement in the way of a tempting price?”
“I’ll take the suggestion to Shephard.”
Suggestion approved by Henry O. Shephard, printer and publisher, and the series is started—an innovation, the first occasion when a monthly magazine changes its cover design with each issue. One cover, nymph in pool, is later reproduced in London Studio. Another, a Christmas cover, has panel of lettering that four American and one German foundry immediately begin to cut as a type. Later the American Type Founders Company, paying for permission, names the face “Bradley.”
A poster craze is sweeping the country. Only signed copies are desired by collectors and to be shown in exhibitions. Designs by French artists: Toulouse-Lautrec, Chéret, Grasset, etc., some German and a few English, dominate displays. Edward Penfield’s Harper’s Monthly and my Chap-Book designs are only American examples at first available.
Will Davis, manager of the Columbia Theater, has just completed the Haymarket, out on West Madison at Halstead. You design and illustrate the opening-night souvenir booklet. This you do for Mr. Kasten, of McClure’s. Thus you meet Mr. Davis. He introduces you to Dan Frohman who commissions you to design a twenty-eight sheet stand for his brother, Charles, who is about to open the new Empire Theater in New York. So you design a poster for The Masqueraders, by Henry Arthur Jones. This is probably the first signed theatrical poster produced by any American lithographer. Then Dan suggests that you visit New York. You do, and meet Charles. Dan takes you to the Players for lunch. There you see show-bills set in Caslon. They influence all of your future work in the field of typography.
We now move to Geneva, Illinois, and I have my studio in a cottage overlooking the beautiful Fox River.
Holiday covers for Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Bazaar, Harper’s Young People, later named Harper’s Roundtable, page decorations for Vogue, a series of full-page designs for Sunday editions of Chicago Tribune, Herbert Stone’s Chap-Book article and other favorable publicity—plucking me long before I am ripe, cultivate a lively pair of gypsy heels; and believing myself, perhaps excusably, equal to managing a printing business, editing and publishing an art magazine, designing covers and posters, I return to Boston, then settle in Springfield, start the Wayside Press, and publish Bradley: His Book.