Kelly Trimble Comments
on "Signed"
Shepherd of the Hills
Excerpts from Message to Gerry Chudleigh, dated July 16, 2001:
This e-mail is about the Harold
Bell Wright signature stamp on the inside cover of modern printings of
Shepherd of the Hills that you say some people are trying to represent
as having been signed by the author. I can give you some details
about this stamp.
My name is Kelly Trimble. I live in Branson, Missouri and my
family owned Shepherd of the Hills Farm through the 1940s until
1985.
When the railroad was completed to Hollister and Branson around 1920,
the rail company promoted trips to 'Shepherd of the Hills Country' and a
lady with a Model-T [Pearl Spurlock, best known
for her early Pontiac] offered tours from the train station
several miles out of town to the farm. At some point in the
twenties or thirties, HBW sent a copy of the book which he signed (a
third or fourth printing as I recall, one of many printings with an oval
picture on the front of the book) to this tour operator for display in
the Ross cabin, promoted as 'Old Matt's Cabin.'
This book was sold
in an estate sale around 1940, but ended up back at the farm at some
point in the 1950s, I think, when my grandfather, Bruce Trimble, started
the tours on a limited basis. My father, Mark Trimble, and
grandmother, Mary Trimble, promoted the outdoor theater production by
Shad Heller and Jim Collie on the property in about 1960 and eventually
ended up with the entire project by the mid-60s. The property
evolved into a
substantial attraction in the region with restaurant,
several gift shops, tours, theater, trail rides, museums and
other activities.
Like any tourist attraction, we sold anything that we could stencil the
words Shepherd of the Hills Farm onto. However, the most popular
souvenir was a modern reprint of the Shepherd of the Hills book by
Grosset & Dunlap, which always refused to sell the rights to the
book due to some dispute with the Wright family. Since we could
not control the printing of the book, Grosset & Dunlap had salesmen
sell the books to every gift shop and tourist trap within a couple of
hundred miles of Branson. In an effort to distingush the books
sold by us from books sold through other shops, we put several markings
on the inside cover of the book. These stamps were intended to
make it clear that the book was purchased on the farm where it was
originally written, allowing us to get a better price than you could get
at the other tourist traps.
The 'For Old
Matt's Cabin,
Harold
Bell
Wright, etc.' stamp was intended to be a copy of
the inscription in the book that HBW sent to the earlier operator of the
property. At one
time this book was displayed in the cabin or the
museum where people could see the the original inscription, with the
modern printing of the book on sale about ten feet away with a copy of
the inscription stamped in the same place. Our stamp was obviously
a stamp. I do not think that anybody who ever bought the book from
us was ever under the impression that the inscription was real and I am
amazed that anybody could ever be fooled into thinking that this stamp
was a real signature. However, in retrospect, I suppose that these
stamps could look like it was signed with a Flair pen, though the
original inscription looked to me to have been written with a medium
fountain pen. We almost always included a stamp that said Shepherd
of the Hills Farm above the HBW inscription.
I myself personally stamped several hundred, possibly several thousand
of these books as a child. We would receive several dozen, or a few
hundred, cases of these books from G & D in the spring, and the gift
shop staff would stamp the books when business was slow throughout
the
year. It was stamped in whatever color we happened to have on hand
in the office. At times we would run out of books that were
stamped and had to resort to stamping the books as they were sold, so we
had to have a stamp at each location on the property where we sold the
book, as well as in the warehouse.
As I recall, the books had a blue
cloth
cover with a dust
jacket
featuring
a photo
of some of the characters in our play in front of the cabin in the
late-1960s and early-1970s, and with a hard cover with the
illustration
printed directly on the cover in the late-1970s and early-1980s. Virtually
all that we sold prior to around 1977 had this same stamp. Later,
stamping the books became a big hassle and didn't seem necessary, so we
did not stamp everything in later years. Over a period of a couple
of decades, we probably sold maybe 50,000 to 100,000 of these books with
the stamp.
We wore out these stamps. Sometimes we could not find a good stamp
and had to order the stamp quickly by ordering it from a stamp company
in Springfield. Since (at that time) it took a couple of hours to
get to Springfield, we did not deliver the inscription to the supplier.
The guy at the office supply company simply went home and got his
copy of the book that he got from us on an earlier trip, or checked it
out of the Springfield library, and traced the stamp out of a book that
we had sold months or years earlier, resulting in several minor
variations in these stamps.
Later, after HBW had been dead forty or fifty years, the book was
briefly in the public domain before copyright laws changed and extended
the copyright back to Grosset and Dunlap [The book
has been in the public domain since 1949]. A former employee, Gary Snadon, bought the
property from my father in the mid-1980s and privately published the
book himself with a paper cover, some with the cabin photo, others with
a print of a water color painting of some of the settings or some of the
characters. Most of this printing that was intended to be sold on
the property had this inscription actually printed into the book so that
the stamp was not needed.
I recognize the books and the stamps in the photos on your site as being
ones that we sold. One thing I can say for sure, though, if it has
a picture of the cabin on the cover or on the dust cover, he could not
have signed it because he died two decades before any of those books
were printed.
Kelly Trimble
Branson, MO
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