Questions and Answers

One of the services offered by Google is the Google Alert. Signing up  for a Google Alert means that you will be e mailed a link whenever the subject you’ve registered appears online in an article, blog, book title, etc.

Several years ago I signed up with “Gertrude Stein” and  “Alice B. Toklas” as my Google Alert topics. Everyday I get between 15-20 Alerts containing references to GertrudeandAlice.

The most common  Gertrude Alert pertains to her quote about Oakland, California that  “There is no there there.”  (In one Alert someone had thought she had said it about Los Angeles!)

Oakland in the 1890's when the there was there

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A few years ago a friend mentioned that the editor of a small press that he knew refused to ever publish anything by or about Gertrude Stein or Alice B. Toklas because he felt that they had “become an industry” and he wanted nothing to do with it.

What had this editor seen over the years that had caused him to come to this conclusion?

For someone who had been drawn to GertrudeandAlice because of their place in popular culture, a place that Gertrude held from very early  in her career even though the number of books that she published and sold was quite small, this attack on GertrudeandAlice as an industry was puzzling.

Maybe the editor was set off after seeing the ceramic “Gertrude stein” from the mid 1970’s with a small knome-like figure on the handle which is supposed to be Alice?

Gertrude Stein stein, 1976

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“And she has and this is it” is the last line of THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS which was first published seventy-six years ago today.

That sentence ended Gertrude Stein’s first bestseller. The initial printing of 5,400 copies in 1933 was more than 10 times as many copies than her last book, MATISSE PICASSO AND GERTRUDE STEIN, which she and Alice had self-published earlier that year. The Literary Guild book club also featured the book as its September selection with an extensive write-up in its membership brochure. The Guild’s Oprah-like imprimatur also helped sales.

A Man Ray  photograph appeared on the dust jacket of the first edition showing Gertrude at her writing table and Alice entering the room, but no where on the dust jacket  or cover page of the book is the author’s name.  And on the back page of the dust jacket, the publisher continues the literary joke by stating:

dust jacket of the 1933 U.S. first edition

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