Elbert Hubbard Books In Order

Publication Order of Elbert Hubbard Books

Elbert Hubbard is a renowned American publisher, artist, and philosopher who was born in Bloomington Illinois in 1856. He was born to medical doctor Silas Hubbard who had moved to the small town just a years before Hubbard was born.
His father never really settled down in Bloomington as he could not find work given that there were too many established medics in the area.

In 1857, he moved the family to Hudson in Illinois where Hubbard and his brothers and sisters went to a public school in the locality.

According to Elbert, he enjoyed his schooling, even though he had no ambition and all he dreamed about was becoming one of the best checkers players in the town.
At sixteen, he worked all manner of jobs starting out as a farmhand and then becoming a teacher and cub reporter.

Later on, he was employed at a soap-making company that belonged to his brother-in-law where he initially worked as a door-to-door salesman before he rose through the ranks.

At nineteen, he was posted to the home office of the Larkin Soap Company in Buffalo where he came up with many successful advertising campaigns. The man was a marketing genius and would come to be considered the grandfather of marketing.
In 1879, he got married to Bertha Crawford at the age of 25.

During the 1880s, Elbert decided that he was done with corporate life and took a severance package from the company as he decided he wanted to become an author.

In 1893, he enrolled at Harvard College, and by 1895, he had three published works under a pseudonym. In the same year, he set up his own print shop which he named Roycroft Press.
It was this printing press that would become the foundation of his runaway success. The “Philistine Magazine,” which was very popular was initially published by Roycroft Press.
“Message to Garcia” which was an inspirational essay that was published first in Philistine would gain the press massive popularity soon after it was launched.
By 1903, the press had moved from the little building where it had been established to a campus where all the dedicated sycophants working there could fit.

Elbert Hubbard managed to attract a growing number of admirers, pilgrims, and artists who wanted to be part of the vibrant artistic community.

The press was known all over the world for its wide variety of copper utensils, hand-illuminated works, leather goods, stained glass, and mission furniture.

In 1915, Elbert Hubbard boarded “The Lusitania,” the British Ocean Liner alongside Alice his wife. They were going to Europe to visit and conduct an interview with Kaiser Wilhelm the German chancellor.
Unfortunately, the Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk by German U-boats while it was cruising in the Irish Sea.

Elbert and Alice would not be parted from each other and since the ship did not have enough lifeboats, they stayed on the deck of the sinking ship where they both died.

He is now best known for his writings that usually contained a mixture of conservatism and radicalism and apotheosizing efficiency and work in an epigrammatic vigorous style.

“A Message to Garcia” by Elbert Hubbard is a motivational classic that was initially intended to be filler for the “Philistine” magazine. At just 17 pages which was written in an hour, the essay is chock full of wisdom.
Major Andrew S. Rowan is at the center of the work which tells of how he traveled across Cuba and its harsh terrain to meet General Calixto Garcia the rebel force leader.

In doing so, he got behind enemy lines and got information that made it possible for the United States to achieve much success during the Spanish-American War.

Hubbard tells this narrative to convince his readers to be prompt rather than act with excessive deliberation. According to Hubbard, education is supposed to teach us how to do something.
According to him a lot of time is wasted in teaching students how to think even though they need to be productive members of society by the time they reach college age.

For the author, college thus becomes a huge waste of time and the greatest hero is the man who is more efficient. In the essay, he asserts that heroism is all about simply doing your job and completing tasks assigned regardless of the challenges.

“Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great” is a collection of biographical writings published in 1894 by Elbert Hubbard.
The author collected and republished the pieces in 1916 which were then compiled into a Memorial Edition in 1996 a few months following his death. The first volume comes with a memoir of the author, while the last includes an index of the entire set.
Originally published in monthly installments, the work is a reflection of Hubbard’s own foibles just as much as it is an account of information about his subjects.

Every chapter is an essay about a famous person from the past from Thomas Edison to William Shakespeare. Many are famous thinkers and authors such as Walt Whitman and William Wordsworth.

The narrative voice is enthusiastic and folksy, even though it is well-read and well educated too. It makes an assumption that you are knowledgeable to an extent about these men since these are, for the most part, not biographical sketches.
They have sometimes been referred to as ramblings that provide context to these famous men using the narrative device of visiting the places in which they lived and ultimately died.

Elbert Hubbard’s “Notebook of Elbert Hubbard” is a work that has essays on many different topics. Hubbard was a huge fan of the arts and crafts as compared to the crass industrialization of the looming 20th century.

Elbert saw the danger of women and men being made into simple cogs in an industrial framework. He also foresaw the rise of modern mass media and advertising that would encourage people to spend most of their resources and time on trivial, worthless, and stupid things that over time would prove meaningless.

He had a strong belief that hands and the head need to be united and as such a writer and philosopher also needs to be a workman, craftsman, or planter that uses his head as much as his hands.