A Message to Garcia: Being A Preachment.

HUBBARD, Elbert.

$1,250.00

Item Number: 143539

East Aurora, New York: Done Into a Booklet by The Roycrofters, December, 1908.

Rare early printing of Hubbard’s best-selling work on individual initiative and conscientiousness in work. 16mo, original publisher’s full limp suede, titles to the front panel stamped in gilt, watered moiré silk endleaves. Signed by the author on a tipped in photographic frontispiece portrait, “Elbert Hubbard.” In good condition.

Elbert Hubbard's best-selling inspirational essay A Message to Garcia remains one of the most eloquent expressions of the American values of individual initiative and conscientiousness in work, illustrated through a dramatized version of a daring escapade performed by an American soldier, First Lieutenant Andrew S. Rowan, just before the Spanish–American War. The essay describes Rowan carrying a message from President William McKinley to "Gen. Calixto García, a leader of the Cuban insurgents somewhere in the mountain fastnesses of Cuba—no one knew where". The essay contrasts Rowan's self-driven effort against "the imbecility of the average man—the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it"The popular tract was originally published as filler without a title in the March 1899 issue of The Philistine, a periodical which, at that time, was written entirely by Hubbard.[2] His complaints about lazy and incompetent workers struck a chord with many corporate executives. One of these was George H. Daniels, a promotion-minded executive with the New York Central Railroad. Daniels reprinted the essay hundreds of thousands of times as part of the railroad's Four-Track Series of pamphlets. Hubbard's Roycroft Press, the publishing arm of an arts and crafts community he founded in East Aurora, New York, reprinted and sold the essay in a variety of bindings—suede, embossed, paperback, and so on—and as paid promotional literature for organizations as disparate as Wanamaker's department store, the Boy Scouts of America, and the United States Navy.