The reprinting of NEQUA has been a real learning situation for me.  Since it is a reprint it does not fit the requirements of a lot of reviewers. Reviews are the way to reach those persons, most interested in a specific type of book. 

Finding the people who will get a review into a publication where it will be read by the segment of the public I have in mind is doubly hard. I want NEQUA to find it’s way into the academic and public libraries.

Why,       ------because I have developed certain suppositions about the motives behind the writing and printing by the original copyright holders.  I feel that the ideas they exposed are still very valid and thus need to be available for readers in a form other than microfilm.  The setting of the story and method of introducing the ideas allows for a person with an avowed dislike of SOCIALISM and SOCIALIST ideas to perhaps read the book without shutting their mind, as many of us are trained to do in college classes, which investigate social and economic systems other than democracy and capitalism.

I am also positive that there are quasi-religious ideas available for a reader of NEQUA that were written into the book. Ideas which lay dormant because they are not part of the main stream of American life.  Some ideas which my eyes and intellect could perceive, but many more that a lack of background and experience on my part is kept hidden from my intellect.  “Hints” that due to societal changes or a lack of guided suggestion, would be read by me, with no ability to cross reference since the origins of  some material or methods of explaining them has changed drastically since the book was originally printed. In other words the common everyday “knowledge of events” which the average man would carry in a  life time in the 1900’s, was very different than my view looking backward from 2015. Only by deconstructing the book with a look out for catch phrases or cliches from 1900 could one actually see the origins of  the book and the intent of the authors.

I found the “mother-love” concept by accident. The names and descriptions of the characters and place names which appear in NEQUA are also not happenstance.

My conclusions as described were partially born out in  statements which appear in a review written by Michelle Yost. She finds several notations which she feels are derived from Mary Baker Eddy and her belief system. I have read some Christian Science material but I missed the references she found. Her review appears in the current issue of  Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction which is published in Liverpool, England.

The Harlem Renaissance Book Fair at the Reardon Center in Kansas City Kansas has come and gone. I had a lot of fun.

I would like to relate that I sold a lot of copies of NEQUA, but I didn’t.  No money, just fun.

I was pleased to see several persons I knew from K.C. MO. The former owner of Wilma’s books which was located on Troost was there. She has a fabulous collection of hardbound books with A+ dust jackets. I have purchased a couple of great books from her in the past.  The Word on The Brazos  by  J. Mason Brewer  in fine condition was the one I remember best.

I met Christine Taylor-Butler, a science-fiction writer who was selling her newest book which has great cover art and illustrations, titled The Lost Tribes.

Sarah Washington O'Neal Rush, Great Granddaughter of Booker T. Washington came from New York, with a book for sale "Rising Up From the Blood: A Legacy Reclaimed, A Bridge Forward,".  She, Steve Penn and Sonny Gibson each gave presentations about their books.  

I also got to see my old boss from the 2010 Census Anita Watley. 

Alvin Sykes was signing the Emmet Till book which explains about his strange path getting the national legislation passed, which provided funds for  Justice Dept. and the F.B.I. to go after civil rights  violators.

I also got to shake hands with Mr. David Haley the Senator  for 4th District in Kansas, which covers Wyandotte County.  Thanked him for his part in backing the Harlem Renaissance Book Fair and asked that he make sure it is back next year, maybe with some funding for expansion.

A great day -even found out that my friend Maurice Copeland used to hang out with a writer I just met named Fred Whitehead. Small interwoven world.

                       The Harlem Book Fair is coming to Kansas City.  It will be held from 

                           10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 24, at the Reardon Civic Center, 

                                     5th and Minnesota Avenue, Kansas City, Kan.

HBF Midwest Regional, Kansas City, Kansas • October 

“The Harlem Book Fair (HBF), the nation’s flagship African American public literary event, is proud to announce its strategic partnership with the Kansas City, Ks NAACP and El Centro, Kansas City’s leading African American and Hispanic community advocacy organizations.”

“The annual Harlem Book Fair Midwest will feature nationally-acclaimed writers, A-list celebrity authors, engaging family literacy events and community-based Kansas City authors and cultural artists.”

“In partnership with the (KCK) NAACP, El Centro, Inc., and their Community Advocates, the Harlem Book Fair Midwest will become the most highly anticipated, inclusive, cross-cultural literary event in the Midwest.” 

It will be held in the Reardon Center and should be a real affair.  I am going to be there Thanks to my friend Sonny Gibson. Sonny has published two books on Negro History in Kansas City, Missouri. 

I will be trying to promote sales of NEQUA. I am also going to take some stuff out of my KC Metro Books collection which are all listed for sale on www.biblio.com .   Mostly I will take books to the Fair by or about Gurdjieff , Ouspensky and friends.

One of the “and friends” is Jean Toomer.  He was born into a bi-racial family. He was part of the Harlem Renaissance and leader of a group of Harlem residents loosely organized as a Gurdjieff Study Group. 

Toomer wrote Cane, Essentials: Definitions and Aphorisms,  The Flavor of Man,   The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer and a series of essays. Toomer's papers and unpublished manuscripts are held by the Beinecke Library at Yale University

In 1926  Toomer went to France and studied with Gurdjieff,  at Fontainebleau. He was a student of Gurdjieff until the mid-1930s.

Toomer joined the Society of Friends (Quakers) and developed several Quaker organizations. He is also credited with starting the Chicago Gurdjieff Group.

See you at the Book Fair.  I’ve got a real good $60.00 copy of Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark for sale also. Bring some money.

Dr. Tilghman Answorth Howard Lowe, the person who first started writing NEQUA, died in Topeka, Kansas on January  3, 1894. That is six or seven years before the book he is credited with writing was actually published and placed on sale to the public. NEQUA was supposed to be serialized in a publication, a "magazine" by the same name as the book. Only four issues of that "magazine" were published. The third issue was actually a double issue which in addition to a chapter of NEQUA it reported on the Co-Operative Congress which was held in Topeka on April 9-11, 1896.

It would be three years, in April of 1899 before Equity Newspaper would be started which restarted the serialization of Dr. Lowe's book. Finally in 1900 the book is placed on sale.

Somewhere I found a notation which listed Mastoiditis as the cause of death. I have lost the citation which mentioned Mastoiditis as contributing to Dr. Lowe's demise.  

Seeing that was a real shock for me. I had been reading another manuscript that had come into my hands. That manuscript resulted in my  taking a look at the personal history  of one of my distant relatives.  A distant relatives who committed suicide, died as a result of the constant pain which increased to a level where his answer to life was death. What really drove this home in my brain was the fact that this distant relative was a preacher, a very well respected pastor. One of those guys who remind us that we do not have any reason to decide to take another persons life and that it is totally forbidden to escape by ending our own.  His constant pain which drove him to suicide was caused by  Mastoiditis.

So finding Mastoiditis as contributing to Dr. T. A. H. Lowe demise pushed me into a real funk. In today's world we have no idea what Mastoiditis is or what the symptoms are like  and no comprehension of what was or wasn’t the treatment in 1900. I don’t think we have any idea of what a simple diagnosis  like that inferred to people of  one hundred years ago.  The prognosis was a down hill slide into insanity and suicide.

One hundred years ago, Mastoiditis, before all of the esoteric pain killers and pain blockers were available  which we rely on today was probably considered a death sentence. People could not stand the constant pain, the attempts to reduce the inflammation were minimal and very few recovered. 

Dr. Tilghman Answorth Howard Lowe was buried in Topeka in an unmarked grave .

I have been  invited to a BOOK FAIR.  So this past two weeks I have been getting ready.  I have searched online for “Book Fairs and Book Festivals”. Since I am such a bibliophile you would think that I would have been to a book fair at least once in my life. The closest thing to a Book Fair that I have attended was an Antiquarian Book sale in Sacramento California. It was real interesting. There were tables with thousands of dollars of rare books. There were booths that only sold Science Fiction and Adventure books and one guy sold “Ephemera”. My computer dictionary defines ephemera as :

items of collectible memorabilia, typically written or printed

ones, that were originally expected to have only short-term

  usefulness or popularity.

The gentleman in Sacramento had pamphlets or paper advertisements from political parties, churches, carnivals, whack-o’s of every description. Cheap printings offering opinions on U.F.O.’s communism, marijuana, medical cures. I spent a lot of time looking. The prices were outrageous.

So that antiquarian sale is what I am using in my mind as a reminder of what a Book Fair may actually be like. The instructions I received from the organizers of the Book Fair say that I will share a table with another person. That translates into an area, three foot by 30 inches. They will provide a chair. So, to simplify things I have done two 8 x17 posters that give people walking by a little bit of an idea about the contents of the book. 

My Internet search for other Book Fairs turned up some amazing information.  Iowa City, Denver Colorado, Paris France, even found the UFO convention in Eureka Springs Arkansas. So I need to look at the possibilities and potentialities, and make some decisions based on potential sales, not on where I would like to go for a little vacation.

Book Fairs sound like a new adventure. Hope they are not as boring as wholesale trade fairs. 

I recently googled Mary P. Lowe. She is still hard to find. Mostly there are notations of genealogy references, a lot of which are for another Mary Lowe. I have a lot of empathy for her as she seemed to get slighted in life and now even in death.

A mother who lost a child.
A husband who died young.
Her home was in a commercial building above her business.
A business which was eventually probably run out of her apartment.
Death at a young age by todays standards.

I am still amazed at how sentimental I am about the persons that were involved with NEQUA.

The Kansas Agitator published in Garnett, Kansas carried a news item on June 18, 1897, which stated that “The New Woman” was the name of a new paper published in Topeka by Mrs. M. P. Lowe and Mrs. Matilda C. Gillmore. “It is published in the interest of woman’s advancement in all lines, and it should be in the hands of every woman in the country. It is one of the best papers in its class. Send a dollar and get it a year.”

I wonder if Mary and Matilda were also friends.

Mrs. M.C. Gillmore was born in Sweden and grew up in Lawrence in her parents Hotel on Vermont Street. She had a son named Jessie R. A. Gilmore who became a printer. During her time in Topeka she is listed as a journalist, residing at 110 West E. Street.  In 1896-1897 she is listed as a widow residing at the Union Pacific Hotel and later at 1224 Jackson with Jessie R. A. Gillmore, a printer. She was the leader of the womans section of the “Patrons of Equity”

She moved with her son and parents to Virginia Beach, Virginia in1900. I never found any notations of her working as a journalist in Florida.

Sure would be nice to know a little more of the story.

Another review from the same time as the one in the last post, appeared in Mind  for the month of February 1901. It was issue #5 Volume 7 on page 399. They used continuous numbering. It was very complementary which makes me wonder why the book did not sell well.

"The urgent need of a panacea for our social ills is significantly illustrated in the popularity of works of fiction having a more or less sensible solution of the world problem as their basis. The motif of the present work is excellent; the Golden Rule is its inspiration throughout. Its teachings are mutualistic*, rather than altruistic or socialistic, and will suggest much of practical value to any benevolent mind. The volume is a romance that will please the admirers of Jules Verne, though its central idea was anticipated in “ Etidorhpa.” Students of sociology, and of the New Thought in general, will find in its well-written pages a great deal with which they are familiar; but as a mere product of the imagination this work will commend itself to every lover of a good story, well told. And it may be regarded as a contribution to the literature of the social problem that will live."

It has also been interesting to see what people think about the book today, when it is one hundred and fifteen years old. Amazon.com asks for reviews from customers of the books they have listed for sale. NEQUA has only been listed there for two months and so far the reviews have been fabulous.

"Nequa' is a mystery, both in terms of its narrative, and its origin. We will likely never know conclusively who penned the novel, but Mark Esping has done meticulous research into the clues left behind. In 1900 'Nequa' was at the forefront of discussion about women's rights, hollow earth exploration (the hollowness of the earth still being in question at the time), and socio-economic reforms to relieve the strain of America's rapid urbanization. The use of a female protagonist in a narrative meant to appeal to men as well as women is surprising. Those interested in fin de siècle utopianism, feminism, and early science fiction will find 'Nequa' a fascinating read. "   

and

"I picked this book up because of the cover and read it because of the story. The story is both complex and compelling. The descriptions of travel on board the ship pulled me along into the story. Even though written at the turn of the last century the unfolding of the relationships on board and within the Utopian society will surprise and inspire readers in this century. The addition of the background information carries this story well into the next century. I thought this was as tremendous sci-fi read as well as a tremendous read.

Makes me feel like the work was worth it.

* spell check did not like this word. My dictionary lists it as an archaic form. Probably is since it means that which is beneficial to all equally.

One of the most important things to remember when reading NEQUA is when it was written, 1900. A reader should try to place themselves in a world with out aeroplanes, with cowboys riding down Main Street, where women were chattel. The derivation of "chattel" is very interesting. It comes from a French word "chatel" which described property. The French got it from Latin "capitale" which was from "caput", the word for head. My dictionary says it compared with capital and cattle.

To interfere with a man beating his wife was a crime. He was just correcting his chattel, his cattle. In Kansas, any woman advocating any idea that could be construed as even imagining that a woman might be a self guided, self regulated, equal under the law, human being, was guilty of treason to the human race.

In Valley Falls, Kansas a newspaper man printed an article which was against The Comstock Act, which specifically prohibited the discussion of martial rape. He served six years in prison for printing the article which had been written by a New York physician. The same editor after moving to Chicago printed two articles which resulted in a year at hard labor (read breaking up rocks). 

So that is the climate in which one should read NEQUA which was partially written by a woman who edited "The New Woman" a suffrage newspaper.

I have found several reviews of the book NEQUA which first appeared in 1901. Here is the first one.



From “The Arena” a magazine
       Vol. XXV # 2  Feb. 1901

........    The latest social vision that has come to my notice is entitled “NEQUA.” The author veils his or her identity under the nom de plume of Jack Adams. As a story, apart from the social theories, it evinces far more imagination than most economic or “problem” novels. There is a strong thread of romance and adventure running through the work. The author tells her story (for we hazard the guess that the author is a woman) in a simple straightforward manner. The hero, the heroine, and the modern argosy sail into the north sea and down into the interior world. Here they meet a race advanced far beyond our civilization, and it is largely with this fine and highly-developed people that the writer deals. The social theories are for the most part in alignment with what we conceive to be the highest and noblest vision that has been vouchsafed to the advance-guard of our time, although some things found in the new world will doubtless fail to command the approval of many readers. The book is a valuable contribution to the literature that is making a better civilization. The more that such books are circulated, the earlier will dawn the new day which shall bring the recognition of the right of all men to have work to do and just remuneration for their labors, the opportunity to enjoy home and the pleasure of education and wholesome recreation.