Jane Pentzer Myers

Jane Pentzer Myers (b. Germantown, Ohio, 1 April 1852; d. Iowa City, Iowa, 31 January 1917)

**revised 28 October 2024**

Jane Pentzer Myers published only one book, a collection of twelve children’s fantasies, Stories of Enchantment (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1901), illustrated by Harriet Roosevelt Richards.  Several of the stories contain Native American elements, like “The Ghost Flower” and “The Corn Fairy”, and thus may be placed alongside similar works of the same time-period like Zauberlinda the Wise Witch (1901) by Eva Katharine Gibson and some of the stories by L. Frank Baum. Myers's narratives are skillful—one is surprised that this is her only book.  

Very little has been known of the author, and what I had published here in 2012 turned out to be incorrect. Thanks to a relative of the author, I can now re-write this entry with correct information.  

She was born Mary Jane Pentzer, though she never used her first name, and was generally known as "Jennie." Her father was Reverend Jacob Pentzer (1808-1884), her mother was Jacob's second wife, Martha Coons (1825-1913); they were apparently married in 1848. Martha Coons was the daughter of Rev. John Coons (1797-1869). Jennie had four half-siblings from her father's first marriage to Emma Meek (1812-1847); and several from her father's second marriage. The family moved from near Dayton, Ohio, to Wilton, Iowa in 1859. Jennie married John Edward Myers (1848-1898) in Wilton on 26 June 1874. The couple moved to Iowa City, where they had three sons, the second of whom died in infancy. Jennie was known as a gifted musician, but around the age of forty, she became invalided by rheumatism, and then she took up writing, reportedly contributing to many magazines (none of these writings have been traced). Her only book was published for the Christmas season in 1901. It was dedicated to her niece. After she was widowed, Jennie lived for a while in Muscatine, where one of her sons taught in the high school. She moved back to Iowa City around 1908, dying at her home, in the early morning of 31 January 1917, of complications of diseases.

 
*This entry was revised and updated on 10 October 2012; again on 15 January 2019; and again on 28 October 2024. I am grateful to Julie (Pentzer) Olson for the information presented here.

Robert Nelson

Robert Nelson (b. St. Charles, Illinois, 23 July 1912; d. Elgin, Illinois, 22 July 1935)

Sable Revery: Poems, Sketches, Letters

Robert William Nelson was the only child of Elmer Nelson (1884-1978) and Ella Larson Nelson (1889-1974), who had both emigrated from Sweden in 1908. They married in 1911. After Robert graduated from the St. Charles High School in 1930, he spent one year at an Illinois university, and also studied journalism in a night class at Northwestern University. Nelson’s engagement with fandom is evidenced by his first letter (of five) in “The Eyrie”, the news and letter-column of Weird Tales, in the issue dated April-May 1931. From then until his death four years later he regularly appeared in letter columns and fanzines. His first poems appeared in 1934, “Below the Phosphor” in The Fantasy Fan for June and “Sable Revery”, in Weird Tales for September 1934. He corresponded with H.P. Love craft and Clark Ashton Smith. In early July 1935, he suffered a nervous breakdown, and seems to have attempted suicide. Though there was hope for his recovery, he died in the hospital in Elgin on 22 July 1935, one day short of his twenty-third birthday.  A collection of all his published writings, Sable Revery: Poems, Sketches, Letters, with an introduction by Douglas A. Anderson, appeared in 2012.  It also includes as an appendix five letters from H.P. Lovecraft, four to Nelson and one to Nelson’s mother after her son’s death. In it, Lovecraft wrote:

“His promise in the field of literature seemed to me very considerable; for despite the marks of youthful construction—indefiniteness or overcolouring now and then—his work had a distinct imaginative richness and atmospheric power which was rapidly improving through criticism and self-discipline. I expected to see him develop like other youths whose careers I have watched—August W. Derleth, Donald Wandrei, Frank B. Long, etc.—who are now well-established figures in the world of weird writing.”

The Nelson family gravestone, Union Cemetery, St. Charles, Illinois

S. Matthewman

S. Matthewman (b. Leeds, 18 January 1902; d. reg. Surrey, July-Sep. 1970)

**updated 7 January 2016; 6 October 2025**

Sydney Matthewman*

Sydney Matthewman was the only child  (per the 1911 UK Census) of John Matthewman (1879-1946), a printer, and Matilda Wardman (1878-1965), who were married in Leeds in the spring of 1901.  He was educated at the Leeds Modern School, and the University of Leeds.  Throughout the 1920s Matthewman was especially associated with the poetry scene in Leeds, as well as in London.  He was the founder and editor of Yorkshire Poetry from 1922-24, while also the associate editor of Poetry Review (1921-23) and assistant editor of The Decachord from 1923-29.

In 1921 Matthewman began to produce booklets of poetry out of his father’s printing business in Swan Street, calling his imprint The Swan Press. His first book was a small pamphlet of his own poems, together with a verse dialogue, entitled The Gardens of Meditation (1921). Within a few years he proceeded on to more substantial works by friends and others with whom he had come into contact at Leeds University.  Besides publishing his own writings (all as “S. Matthewman”), the Swan Press also published collections by Catholic poet and Leeds professor Wilfred Rowland Childe (1890-1952), and anthologies like A Northern Venture: Verses by Members of the Leeds University English School Association (1923) and Leeds University Verse: 1914-1924 (1924), which include poems by J.R.R. Tolkien, then also on the faculty at Leeds. Many of the Swan Press books were published in small editions. The first printing of A Northern Venture, published in June 1923, was a mere 170 copies, and the reprint in July was of another 200 copies. This title was an exception, for most of the Swan Press booklets were not reprinted at all. 

Decoration by Albert Wainwright,
for The Crystal Casket

Most of Matthewman’s own small books were published between 1921 and 1930.  These include poetry, The Lute of Darkness (1922), Two Poems of the Road (1924), Six Epigrams (1924), The Harlequin (1925), Poems 1927 (1927), Orchard Idyll (1927), Strange Garden (1928), Epithalamion: An Ode (1929); a small essay collection, Sketches in Sunshine (1926); and a few prose fantasies, The Crystal Casket (1924), and The Vision of Richard concerning the Chapel of the Sword and the Rose (1926). The Crystal Casket is a short original fairy tale of merit. A third prose fantasy is How Brother Theodosius Beheld a Vision: A Little Tale of the Springtime (1928), printed privately in an edition of fifty-seven copies. In an entry for a writer’s directory, Matthewman listed a few further titles that cannot presently be verified, including Interlude (1929), as well as some planned translations: Plum Blossom and Nightingale from the Japanese, The Rubai yat of Sarmad (with B. Ahmed Kashmi), and The Complete Poems of Meleager. None of these seem to have been been published.  For High House Press in Shaftesbury, Matthewman translated Hylas: The XIIIth Idyll of Theokritos (1929), and wrote The High House Press: A Short History and an Appreciation (1930). Four Country Poems (1932) came out from Red Lion Press in an edition of fifty copies. Many of Matthewman’s books have decorations by Albert Wainwright (1898-1943).

Matthewman's bookplate (courtesy of Shane Taylor), using Laurence Housman's frontispiece to his collection The Field of Clover (1898), engraved by his sister Clemence Housman

Matthewman served as secretary to various scientific societies, and joined the Leeds Civic Playhouse in 1927.  He played the part of Hannan in the first British production of The Dybbuk by S. Ansky (1863-1920). Matthewman married Phyllis Barton (1896-1979) on 22 February 1930.  They had no children and moved around frequently, and sometime in the 1930s Sydney had some sort of breakdown.  Phyllis Matthewman took up writing with Chloe Takes Control (1940), published by the Girls Own Paper Office in London.  Over the next three decades, she would publish over seventy books, most of them novels, many of them published by Mills & Boon. In the mid-1940s she published two novels under the pseudonym Kathryn Surrey. Her final books appeared in 1974.

In 1944, Sydney and Phyllis took temporary refuge from the bombings around their home in Surrey by removing to Hereford, where they became close friends of the writer Elinor Brent-Dyer (1894-1969), author of the popular “Chalet School” series for girls.  Phyllis and Brent-Dyer had known each other as children, but hadn’t been especially close. 

In 1946, after a long hiatus, Sydney published two small books of poetry, Gabriel’s Hounds, a tale in verse, and Christmas Poems. He also served as editor for The Bookmart in 1946-47. 

In 1949, when Sydney set up a literary agency, Elinor Brent-Dyer became one of his first clients.  In 1964, the Matthewmans and Brent-Dyer purchased a house in Redhill, Surrey, where the Matthewmans lived on the ground floor and Brent-Dyer occupied the upstairs flat.  Local residents in Redhill recall Sydney Matthewman as a tall man, around six foot three or four inches tall, who wore a monocle. Brent-Dyer died suddenly in 1969. Sydney Matthewman died the following year.  Phyllis Matthewman lived on until 1979, passing at the age of 83.

*Thanks to Michael Green for the scan of the photograph of Matthewman, the frontispiece to Poems (19 27) 

Benson Bidwell

Benson Bidwell (b. Avon, New York, 2 September 1835; d. Chicago, Illinois, 7 March 1911)

Benson Bidwell published only two books, both coming out at his own expense in 1907.  The first is an autobiography of sorts, with the breathlessly long title Benson Bidwell: Inventor of the Trolley Car, Electric Fan and Cold Motor: History of Early Struggles and Later Successes: With Personal Reminiscences, Lectures, Essays and Letters (Chicago: The Henneberry Press, 1907).  The second is a slim epistolary fantasy, The Flying Cows of Biloxi (Chicago: The Henneberry Press, 1907). The latter book has achieved a legendary status.  According to Vincent Starrett, who wrote in 1948 in his “Books Alive” column in The Chicago Daily Tribune, “it first came to notice of fantasy collectors, in 1933, when it was listed in Science Fiction Digest and attracted attention by its provocative title. Ever since, book hunters in the fantasy field have been seeking the tale and failing to find it; it has become one of the famous ‘phantom books’ of recent bibliography” (11 April 1948). Starrett also quoted Melvin Korshak, who during the World War II had been stationed near Biloxi and one day went there and questioned the mayor and a delegation of alderman about the book:  “without result, except that I worried them considerably about a mystery book that took the name of their city in vain. They didn’t know anything about flying cows, either; and they would like to know something about Benson Bidwell, the reputed author.” A few years later, Frederick Shroyer devoted his column (“The Antiquarian Bookshelf”) in the September 1950 issue of Fantasy Advertiser to discussing the book.  Many years later, Sam Moskowitz published “A Collector’s Saga” in Fantasy Commentator, no. 45/46 (Winter 1993/1994) a long account of his search over many years to acquire a copy. Typically Moskowitz’s account centers on acquisition, not on putting any historical perspective on Bidwell or his book.

Joseph Benson Bidwell was born in upstate New York, the third child (of six) of Austin Burhham Bidwell (1804-1865), a confectioner, and Laura Isabell Butterfield, who were married in 1832.  On 3 February 1856, Bidwell married Clarissa Eliza Walker Burch (1838-1907). They had four children, two sons and two daughters. Unusually for his time, Bidwell seems to have moved around a lot.  According to the U.S. Censuses, in 1850 he and his family were living in Toledo.  In 1860 Bidwell listed himself as a baker in New York City. Ten years later he is found as a candy manufacturer in South Bend, Indiana.  By 1880, Bidwell has moved to Indianapolis, his profession elevated to that of a lawyer, while in 1900 he had evolved into an electrician in Chicago (the 1890 Census was destroyed by fire many years ago).

Bidwell first book was a self-aggrandizing autobiography in which claims are made for various inventions and episodes from his life are whipped up to the status of myth, complete with illustrations, some of which are unintentionally quite funny, having captions like “Baby Brother Petting Snake,” “He Scalds His Mother’s Foot,” “Live Indian Roasted on Logheap,” “Old Horse Resents Singeing,” etc. The legend to Bidwell’s frontispiece portrait elevates himself to the status of professor. The prose is also overblown, and the claims that Bidwell invented of the trolley car, the electric fan, and the cold motor engine, remind the modern reader of the sham hucksterism of the likes of P.T. Barnum. 

The Flying Cows of Biloxi, which is also illustrated with line drawings by the same artist, purports to collect Bidwell’s letters to a friend telling how, when visiting Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1893, Bidwell observed that the cows fed upon spanish moss, which grows only high-up in the trees.  So Bidwell invented a way to graft branches of orange trees onto the cows so they could fly up for their food.  The wings have the added advantage of growing oranges! Another great invention for the talented Bidwell!

From The Flying Cows of Biloxi

The truth is another matter.  A perusal of The Chicago Record-Herald shows that in early 1908 Bidwell and his elder son, Charles Freeman Bidwell (1857-1929), who was also his business partner, were arrested and charged with fraud and embezzlement.  Investors in his cold motor engine claimed that their money was used solely to fund the publication of his two books.  In October 1908 the pair were convicted of running a confidence game and sentenced to ten years in prison.  Charles Bidwell withdrew his appeal and accepted the prison term on the condition that his elderly and widowed father, whom he claimed was near death, could remain free.

An advertisement for the cold motor

NB: A portion of the above appeared in different form in the “Curiosities” column of the October-November 2005 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. 

George Blink

George Blink (b. Warley Camp, Essex, about 1798; d. Brighton, Sussex, 4 January 1874)

British Post Office official (President, Islington), and occasional dramatist.  George Blink was one of the ten children of William Blink (b. c. 1760) and Sarah Lenham (b. c. 1765). In Islington on 17 April 1822, Blink married Mary Anne Cliffe (1802-1873). They had four children, two sons followed by two daughters.

Blink authored at least three plays that were performed and subsequently printed up as small pamphlets.  The dating of the pamphlets, as well as the dating of the first performances of any play of that time period, is extremely difficult. 

Blink’s most significant work is The Vampire Bride: or, The Tenant of the Tomb: A Romantic Drama, in Two Acts (London: J. Duncombe, [1830]).  This premiered as the opening piece at the Sadler Wells Theatre in London on 8 March 1830, followed by performances of “Paul and Virginia” and “The Flying Dutchman.”  “The Vampire Bride” was also staged elsewhere in England, and occasionally revived, such as at the Queen’s Theatre in Manchester on 28 September 1839. Blink’s play is based on the anonymous English translation of Ernst Raupach’s “Lasst die Todten Ruhen” (1822), published as “Wake Not the Dead” in Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations (1823).  Raupach’s name is nowhere mentioned. A later edition, with slightly different text, appeared as The Vampire Bride: or, Wake Not the Dead: A Melo-Drama in Two Acts (London: T. H. Lacy, [1854]).

Frontispiece and title page of the 1854 edition.

Other plays by Blink include The Tiger at Large; or, the Cad of the “Buss”;  A Comic Burletta, in One-Act (London:  Chapman & Hall, 1837), first performed at the Strand Theatre on 8 May 1837; and Blind Man’s Buff:  or, Who Pays the Bill: A Farce in One Act (London:  John K. Chapman and Co., 1850).  A play of this latter title had debuted at the Royal Amphitheatre in September 1815, but this was probably an entirely different play. The Lord Chamberlain licensed another play with this same title on 18 August 1837, and this is probably the one by Blink.

NB: An earlier version of this entry appeared in my column “Notes on Neglected Fantasists”, Fastitocalon no. 1 (2010).  

Clark B. Firestone

Clark B. Firestone (b. Lisbon, Ohio, 10 September 1869; d. Cincinnati, Ohio, 3 June 1957)

Clark B. Firestone in 1950

Clark Barnaby Firestone was the third of four children of Solomon Jefferson Firestone (1833-1912) and Anna Elizabeth Williams (1836-1926).  He had two older brothers and one younger sister.  Firestone graduated from the Lisbon High School and went on to Oberlin College, where he received an A.B. in 1891, an honorary M.A. in 1911, and an honorary LL.D. in 1951. In 1906 he married Beatrice Sturges (1874-1958); they had three sons and one daughter.

Firestone spent most of his life as a journalist and newspaperman.  He began on The New York Mail and Express, where he was a reporter (1892-99), chief editorial writer (1899-1901 and 1903-11), and London correspondent (1901-02).  After a year (1911-12) as editorial writer at The New York World, he returned to Lisbon to serve as president and director of the Firestone Bank, owned by his late father.  In 1921 he returned to newspaper journalism as the editorial writer for The Cincinnati Times-Star.  He became associate editor of this newspaper in 1930, a position he held until his retirement in 1954.

Firestone’s first book was technical work for the Army Ordnance Department of the U.S. Government, The Ordnance Districts, 1918-1919, Philadelphia (1920). He followed this with a series of travel books, the first being a work of romantic scholarship on the on the reaches of literary imagination as found in old travel tales. Subsequent books were rooted more closely to home, including the successful Sycamore Shores (1936), about a journey on some rivers of the Middle West, including the Ohio and Mississippi rivers; Bubbling Waters (1938), about a walking tour of the mountain country of Kentucky and Tennessee;  the shorter, self-described Journey to Japan (1940); and finally, another popular book, Flowing South (1941), an account of some five thousand miles of travel on the inland waters of the Mississippi and Missouri river systems. Other works include a libretto, Enter Pauline: A Lyrical Romance in Two Chapters and a Frontispiece (1929), book and lyrics by Firestone with score by Joseph Surdo; and three volumes of poetry, The Winding Road (1937), Tower Window (1949) and The Yesterdays (1953).

It is for Firestone’s second book that he deserves coverage here. The Coasts of Illusion: A Study of Travel Tales (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924) is a wide-ranging exploration of the myths and half-myths of geography that are loosely called “travel tales”, including both the countries of legend and the creatures that were reported to have been their inhabitants.  Subjects covered thus include Atlantis, the Amazons, dragons, rocs, unicorns, the Pygmies, Satyrs, the Sargasso Sea, and El Dorado.  A thoroughly entertaining catalog of the places and beings with which mankind has though history populated the shifting borderlands between knowledge and imagination. 

Royal W. Jimerson

Royal W. Jimerson  (b. Minneapolis, Minnesota, 4 September 1895; d. San Francisco, California, 3 August 1958)

Royal Wade Jimerson was the oldest of two children of Herbert W. Jimerson (1865-1964) and Harriet M. Page (1874-1972), who were married in Minneapolis on 7 November 1894.  Royal had one sister, Faith, who was six years younger than himself.

The family moved to Wisconsin before 1910, and Royal was educated at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. For about five years he worked as a reporter on The Minneapolis Star and The Minneapolis Tribune.  He married Mabel Weik (1886-1974) in Chicago on 24 February 1917. At the time he filled out his draft registration card for World War I, Jimerson was a newspaper reporter in Chicago. Jimerson and his wife had two children; their oldest son Herbert was born in Minneapolis in 1917 but died of bronchial pneumonia in 1929.  Their second son, Royal W. Jimerson, Jr., was born in 1920.

In 1925 Jimerson joined The San Francisco Examiner as a rewrite man, and the family moved to California.  He went over to The San Francisco Chronicle in 1935 as a reporter, but later returned to The San Francisco Examiner as financial editor.  In 1938 he was appointed political editor, a position he held until 1954 when he retired because of illness.  He died in San Francisco at the age of 62.

In April 1928 he published a single story in Weird Tales magazine, “Medusa”, with a headpiece illustration by Hugh Rankin.  E.F. Bleiler has noted that it is a modernized version of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”, calling it “well-written, and one of the more effective horror stories of the period.”  It was reprinted by Christine Campbell Thomson in her anthology By Daylight Only (1929), the fifth volume in the British “Not at Night” anthology series. “Medusa” was also reprinted in the May 1938 issue of Weird Tales. It is Jimerson’s only known published work of fiction. 

Jimerson also had two letters in “The Eyrie”, the letter column of Weird Tales, in the January and May 1928 issues. In the latter letter, Jimerson wrote: “Your March issue hits a new high level.  My own preference is for stories that leave something to the imagination, and the March number hits the ball. Its literary quality is about the best you have attain; from cover to cover, the boys have done their job beautifully.”   

NB: Thanks to Alistair Durie and Terence McVicker for assistance on this entry.