B. F. SCHLESINGER & SON'S Inc. Cumulative 7% Preferred Stock at Market to Yield About 7.5%. The excellent economies effected through the "Four-Store Buying CITY OF PARIS, San Francisco, California B. F. SCHLESINGER & SONS, INC., Oakland, California RHODES BROS., Tacoma, Washington are reflected directly in the earnings. The ability of the management is Earnings and management are primary considerations in selecting OUR What's What on the Editor's Desk UR March issue, devoted to George Sterling, still causes the circulation Demands for department over-work. copies of the book, letters containing a world of miscellaneous history of intimate and otherwise Sterlingana, postcards asking if copies may be borrowed and telephone calls requesting a copy regardless of price continue to pour in by each mail. And of all this persistency we have taken full measure. Long hours of planning, with careful and exhaustive search, has given us the decision to produce another Sterling number. Mainly through the labors and kindness of Mr. Albert Bender, long and intimately a friend of George Sterling, are we able to announce the November, 1927, issue a second Sterling Memorium Number. Mr. Bender's friendship with international and national high-lights in the art and literary world allows Overland the privilege of securing the finest pictorial and literary talent possible for the Sterling book. An article. by Mary Austin is already procured. Witter Bynner, Senator James Phelan and Edwin Markham have agreed to work on special Sterling copy. Colonel Erskine Scott Wood and Sarah Bard Field will also be represented. lastly, Mr. Bender will personally develop an appreciation of George Sterling and allow Overland its presentation. From the table of Contents to the last page of literary matter there will be the finest craftsmen in America writing. And We feel that no magazine in this country can include the authors we have secured for our November issue; and we ask, therefore, that you place your order at once through Overland or your newsdealer for this special. You remember the shortage Overland experienced on the rush for Sterlingana last March. To thwart that condition we suggest that you order several copies in advance of publication should you care to send Overland through personal mails, advising you that newsstand convenience for extra numbers will be extremely hazardous a brief time after publication. We will be pardoned a note something akin to ego; surely when we announce that it should be remembered no author will be printed who has not achieved national recognition; in keeping with the reputation and labors of one of this country's three great poets of the past three decades. And for the privilege of offering this announcement, full appreciation and gratitude is directed to Albert Bender of San Francisco. THE Senator Phelan-Overland Monthly Poetry Contest develops into actual labor! Mails are expending every day with manuscripts. We hadn't believed it possible for California to contribute through print so much literary matter. And in the nation's most excellent magazines! Harper's, Commonweal, The Saturday Review of Literature, Dial, New Masses, Century and Nation are a few of the printed poems delivered us to date. Innumerable of the country's little verse magazines are on our desk-quite a goodly number we didn't know existed. Systemization and recording will commence July fifteenth, and until that date very little can be said of the respective quality and worth of the poetry submitted to the contest. But we have already decided, reading bits here and there, that nothing short of amazing statistics will be offered by Overland to the literary world when a report on the amount and solidity of California Poetry production is printed. And we desire to request, because delivery has been not so great in this matter, that you remember unpublished work is drawing the same attention as the printed work. As well as discovering which poet has submitted and printed the finest poem, in our estimation, from California-there is also to be discovered the finest unpublished poem and, we hope, the finest unpublished poet. We don't recall having said it before, but we want to go in print on it: greatness is not always in printer's ink. We believe many unpublished poets in this State as well as the others, have matter on hand equal to the highest being printed. To get at the root of this condition and to account for it is mainly the service of the contest arranged through Senator Phelan. Many of you already know the national authors Overland has given to literatureand of the great time and courage Senator Phelan devotes to the new literary age. AUGUST will be an exceptionally UGUST will be an exceptionally with the best of fiction and poetry writ ten in the Western World, there's an impressionistic sketch designed for us by Carey McWilliams. You will recall the excellence of Mr. McWilliam's contributions in preceeding issues of Overland. Of decisive importance, and in line with the character portraits appearing each month, will be a fully chiseled type-picture of James Powers, San Francisco's Post Master. Few, we suspect, realize the tremendous labor involved in handling several million packages and letters shooting out from San Francisco, America's great Cosmopolitan centre, to every corner of the earth. In this article a little of the executive ability and humanness of Mr. Powers will be drawn. One or two other features of extraordinary importance for August will be: SAN * AN FRANCISCO, OR YOUNG MEN IN LOVE, one of the main outstanding features of August, by Carey McWilliams. Also we are glad by Edgar Lloyd Hampton for the same to announce the article on Los Angeles issue. Rupert Murray sends us word that it will be in our hands for the August issue. In this same issue are two historical stories, one "The Pony Express" by Ernest Owen Sonne, and another by Chauncey Pratt Williams, "Ezekiel Williams." And lest you forget what authors Albert Bender has secured for our November issue, we list below from his latest report: Mary Austin, Sara Bard Field, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, James D. Phelan, Witter Bynner, Edwin Markham, Oscar Lewis, Austin Crane, Albert Bender, Robbinson Jeffers, Ina Coolbrith and others of note. Order your November copies now and be sure of receiving this issue. JULY CONTRIBUTORS VERLAND is indebted to Ansel E. Poetry Page Editorial and Business Offices 356 PACIFIC BUILDING, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA Chicago Representative, George H. Myers, 5 South Wabash Avenue SUBSCRIPTION $2.50 PER YEAR 25 CENTS PER COPY Manuscript mailed The Overland Monthly without a stamped and Entered as Second-Class matter at the postoffice, San Francisco (Contents of this Magazine Copyrighted) OVERLAND MONTHLY and OUT WEST MAGAZINE T An American Athens HERE is something remarkable about a state nicknamed the Pelican and a people nicknamed the Creoles. But more than all else there is something fine to be written on New Orleans of Louisiana. The marvelous old station patiently shoulders the sign: "America's Most Interesting City"-but there is some other word. Not so definitely interesting, let's say, as human. We are back in San Francisco, a little glad and a little sorry. It is hard to forget the rapid clicking over rails squat in beds completely bordered by a natural beauty. The quiet hours of comfort and service in an observation car designed for the ultimate in comfort. The courtesy of the Southland-seeming to be bred in the bone of the porters whose grins and whose assistance became as much a part of the trip as, let us say, the panorama of green stuff and blossom perfume. It is a garden, really, that green and brown stretch of earth along that part of the Southern Pacific's "Sunset Route" that lies between Los Angeles and New Orleans. And if you can picture yourself being borne through this garden place in the Grecian comfort and the calming security of servants whose main duty is to pave your journey with the acme of service-then you will have an idea of the journey over the Southern Pacific road. We don't like the term "bewitching," but here we must use it. There is no other word properly schemed to describe that two thousand miles of languid somnolence and clean-cut travel. No other expression to use when the morning breakfast is taken in a diner whose windows are exquisite panels of Oil fields seen over the Sunset Route By Donald Gray America's color and strength and beauty. And it is the only word, now at the coming of summer when the New Orleans road is a mass of green stuff and flowers, to use when all speech is dropped and the eye fills with a virgin nature and a cloud-washed heaven. In the tart dawn before the sun climbs up into the blue, it is worth a lifetime of city labor and crowded exertion to spend a few hours in that quietly speeding observation car and watch the receding hills, the purple distances, the rapidly passing glimpse of little hamlets sprawled over a brief valley, the lazy curl of fog from an awakening earth meeting the slim threads of chimney smoke from little houses hidden in the hand of the soil. To speed furiously on, smoothly and easily, with the adventure of Land's Santa Barbara Mission our hide-clothed possessions, of silent ef ficiency and immaculate understanding. What a tremendous change from the stage coach! What an immense transformation in the few short years separating 1870 from 1927! End always dominant and the knowledge AND there is the test of all this of safety a solid and comfortable impression. Through the South Pass and the Wind River mountains, over the earth whereon a few years ago the antelope and buffalo and Indian held a savage court and were kings in the grand manner! It is hard to believe that once the stage coach wormed through this pass, victim of feuds and Indian warfare, pitiably ineffective beneath the arm of a savage and the arm of a relentless nature. Hard, especially in this 1927 comfort and beauty and ease to remember stories of the traveling coach and the weeks spent therein. That in a few years we have gone from the cowhide board of a bumping wagon and the difficult confusion of insecure travel to the plush cushions of an evenly-tempered coach and the noiseless speed of an iron monster tireless and invincible. That in a breath of the centuries we have completed the smooth Southern Pacific road-beds and instigated the charming courtesy of convenience and delight in travel which is a thorough description of the gleaming coaches and intensely modern equipment of our train. From the observation car to the first coach behind the engine there is always the knowledge of services being performed for our comfort, of means and cares being taken for the protection of pleasure; in the very end, when the white-toothed porter commences cleaning our baggage and brushing our boots, when the excited travelers suppress their hastily exclaimed "New Orleans!" and the long-bodied servant of glass and steel and wood is at last standing unlabored and at lazy ease in the dark bigness of the depot. There is the surprised knowledge that the journey is so suddenly over, that we are unwearied and fresh, that in that exquisite trip we have never noticed the flying hours, keeping their unceasing time with the huge steel wheels. That is the test of travel, of all transportation to all the corners of the world. We had sliced Arizona, dipped into New Mexico, looked into the Mexican hills from El Paso, come through Texas, crossed the Mississippi and were in the depot at New Orleans. It is a strange thing, this modern. travel. A glorious series of compact pictures and impressions. A show where everything is provided, food, bed, magazines, sweets, all the conveniences of life. Where you are the central figure, the meat of the shell so to speak, for whom the entire theatre has been provided and in whom it concentrates its choicest delights. The hours must not lag-and they do not. Each minute is a moment of pleasure, every day a space of delight. From the rush and last part |