The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest.

East Aurora, NY: The Society of the Philistines. 1899-1900.

Volume X containing six issues of The Philistine from December 1899-May 1900. 150x110mm. Paginated continuously through the six issues. pp192 and with unpaginated material including advertisements before and after the main sections. Quarter calf, blue paper covered boards, title and volume number stamped in gilt to upper cover and a paper label to spine. With the original wrappers bound in. Spine is faded and there is some marking to a few of the original wrappers but otherwise In very good condition throughout.
The Philistine is a rather wonderful journal established and edited by a rather wonderful man, Elbert Hubbard. It began when Hubbard's submissions to newspapers and magazines were rejected. It went on to become "the most successful and longest-lived of the little magazines born in the nineties." Inspired by William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, Hubbard was also the founder of the Roycroft community which ran on Morrisian lines with much borrowing from medieval aesthetics, Hubbard even renaming himself "Fra Elbertus". The Philistine was combative, opinionated, derogatory and funny. It was named after the Biblical and barbaric Philistines, Hubbard's idea being that society needed to be torn down and remade. Its guiding spirit is one of "corrective protest" (see Bruce A. White. "Elbert Hubbard and The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest (1895-1915): The Muscular Journalism of an American Freethinker").