The Floating Aristotelian Hobo Poet Laureate of West Madison Blvd, 1925

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2228

It seems that this odd and strangely beautiful pamphlet, ?All, by A.W. Dragstedt, is a fascinating surviving relic of a largely ephemeral world.  Mr. Dragstedt was the secretary of the Kingdom of Hobos of the United States, and for years was largely and necessarily on-the-move, though he seems to have settled into Chicago a bit when he served in official HoboWorld capacities.  The penned address on the incredible front cover ("913 W. Washington Blvd, Chicago", today the home of the improbably-named "Sushi Pink" restaurant) was one of the addresses identified for the Hobo College in which he worked--that according to Roger Bruins, in his book on King of the Hobos, The Damndest Radical (1987).  This means that Dragstedt--also known to some as the Poet Laureate of West Madison (Blvd)¹ and the "Hobo Intellectual"^2--probably wrote this while staying there, at the Hobo College, in 1925. THis opens up a new field to me--printed Hoboiana, published works by working Hobos³.  

Aside from its unusual composition and design, the work is an unwieldy but semi-non-poetic Aristotelian pronouncement on the constitution of man and the cosmos, and pretty mysterious. Well, "Aristotelian" goes a bit to far, but in a way it is accurate, because the author considers the essence of matter and being and time and space and is an observer of his world, and seems for himself anyway to have drawn a conclusion from it all, though it is difficult for me to say exactly what that is.  Since the document is only a folded piece of paper, and the cover and back-page ad covers half of it, I've reproduced the two pages of print below.  

It must have been a considerable effort to make something like this happen, even if you did occupy a powerful position in a floating world.  

Notes

1.  The Bruins book was a biography of Ben Reitman and the Hobo culture of Chicago. The poet laureate statement comes on page 207. See University of Illinois special collection on the Ben Reitman papers, here. 

2. Piers Beirne. The Hobo, the Sociology of the Homeless Man (Nels Anderson), 1923, University of Chicago/Routledge.  

3.  This opens up another question--Hoboiana printed by Hobos at a Hobo press.  The printer here is not identified, but it is certainly crude or rudientary. The back page is a full-page add for another work (God and My Neighbor), and sounds like a book ("extra cloth, 248 large pages"), distributed by The Tower of Babel Book Store and Thurland & Thurland of Chicago. It is unclear of what the exact connection here is between Dragstedt and the distributor. 

And the rest: