Up for auction "Vassar College" Burges Johnson Hand Signed TLS Dated 1920.
ES-9301
Born in
Rutland, Vermont, on November 19, 1877, Burges Johnson was the third of four
children of Reverend James Gibson Johnson and his wife Mary, who interested her
son in literature at a young age. In his memoir As Much As I Dare
(1944), he recalled their nighttime reading sessions. “I wonder how many
thousands of pages our mother read aloud to us four youngsters throughout our
childhood. Bible stories, fairy tales, thrillers in St.
Nicholas, and books without number.… The low rocker in which she sat
is today my most treasured bit of furniture; and I can almost regain at times
that all-pervading sense of perfect comfort when a light burns bright after I
am in bed, and the silence means she might at any moment begin a story.” His
early love of literature matured as he attended school in New London and later
Chicago before enrolling at Amherst College to study English. In 1899, he
graduated from Amherst with a B.A. degree. He was awarded an honorary Litt. D.
from the college in 1924. On June 14, 1904, Johnson married Constance Wheeler,
the daughter of the former president of the New York Bar Association, Everett
P. Wheeler. The couple had three children, Mary, James and Miriam, and they
wrote a number of books together including Yearbook of Humor
(1910) and Parodies for Housekeepers (1921). Johnson began his
career in journalism, at The New York Commercial Advertiser and The New York Evening Post.
He then entered the publishing world, working at G.P. Putnam's Sons and Harper
& Brothers. He also held positions as assistant editor at Everybody's Magazine, managing editor at Outdoor Magazine, editor-in-chief at Judge Magazine and president at Thompson Brown &
Co. publishers. Although very devoted to his work as a publisher, Johnson
recalled in his memoir his growing interest in academia: “Now and then during
those Harper days, after I had married and when I visited one college campus or
another, I would hear the faint voices of those many Yankee ancestors who had
been teachers and preachers hinting that an academic life had many advantages
for a family man.” In 1914 Johnson mentioned this notion to Henry Noble
MacCracken, a witnesses for an E.P. Dutton & Co. suit involving its book
series Everyman's Library. An English professor at Smith
College, MacCracken had long used Everyman titles for
his courses. The two discussed a job offer Johnson had received from Columbia
University to work in its new journalism school as a part-time instructor.
MacCracken advised Johnson to turn down the instructor position and wait for an
opportunity that would grant him a more appropriate position. In December 1914
MacCracken was named to succeed James Monroe Taylor as president of Vassar, and
in his first official act after he assumed the office on February 1, 1915, he
offered Johnson a teaching position at the college, writing to him: “If you are
seriously thinking about the possibility of teaching, why not come up here? We
will allow you to go to New York for half of the week, and we will treat you
better at Vassar than Columbia would.” MacCracken was particularly interested
in hiring Johnson because of his experience in journalism and, by extension,
public relations. In a 1914 Vassar Miscellany
article, Elizabeth Hazelton Haight ‘94, the chairman of the newly formed
Publicity Committee of the Alumnae Council, had outlined Vassar's plans to
develop a publicity department similar to those at Smith, Mount Holyoke and
Wellesley, to include not only the chair of the Publicity Committee but also
members of the student Press Board: “The committee hopes that after a year, it
may be able to report that more students are writing for papers, that many more
newspapers are regularly printing news (and significant news) of Vassar
college, that special articles on the educational policies of the college and
on its inner life are appearing and that the alumnae at large are cooperating
with it in helping to distribute news of the college to the press and in
sending back news of themselves to the college.”
