S. Q. LAPIUS Public Deposited
The E-Sylum: Volume 6, Number 18, May 4, 2003, Article 11
S. Q. LAPIUS
Regarding my query about the book by S. Q. Lapius, Len
Augsberger writes: "First of all, the name "S. Q. Lapius" has
that "weird" look to it, like it might be an anagram or pen name.
I checked http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram and did not
find any reasonable matches.A Google search shows S.Q. Lapius was in New York in 1900,
in a letter he wrote to a periodical. Lapius refers to a "patient"
and may have been a doctor.
http://www.attic.utoledo.edu/att99/auto/ha3.htmlO. Henry makes an allusion to Mr. Lapius in one of his stories at:
O. Henry was American, which weakly implies that Lapius
was also American.There are few hits at ancestry.com, though they do suggest a
pocket of Lapius families in New York, one of whom (John H.
Lapius) was a Civil War veteran. The surname is very unusual --
switchboard.com lists NO Lapius families anywhere in the US.
Nothing on amazon.com.I do see another S. Q. Lapius in Newry, UK, in 1828:
http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/read/NIR-DOWN/2002-12/1040481358
This article suggests that the writer may be a doctor.My next step would be to check Syracuse, New York
directories for 1900, then with address in hand check the
1900 census (which is available imaged but not indexed
online). If there is a historical society in Syracuse they might
have something too.I speculate that the name is so unusual that the two individuals
here are likely father and son, both doctors, with the father
in the UK and the son in America. The evidence is not strong
but that's the first theory I would work with.All that said, perhaps the most expeditious way to get the
Lapius book would be to call up the bookstore in the UK
where the writer says he found it!"[For sheer amusement, I recommend readers check out the
first of Len's links. It describes a comical incident with a
newfangled steam-power automobile, and introduces a new
vocabulary word: autogorium!Len's research is very interesting. I should have spent more
time myself looking online. More information came from
John Kleeberg, who writes:"I did some some searches on OCLC and RLIN. OCLC
provides four entries for books by this author, all books of
poetry published in Columbus, Ohio. "Coins from a Country
Railway Station" is, like the others, a book of poetry. Only
three copies listed in OCLC, none on RLIN; the three copies
on OCLC are all in Ohio libraries around Columbus. An entry
for a collected book of Lapius' poetry ("A Ship at Sea and
other Rhymes") says that the name was a pseudonym for the
physician Justin Allis Garvin (1886-1946), but something must
be wrong because those dates are hard to reconcile with the
date of "Coins from a Country Railway Station" (1893), unless
Garvin was unusually precocious.The New York Public Library only has a handwritten transcript
of one of Lapius' poems about tobacco farming in, of course,
the Arents Tobacco Collection. The British Library has none
of Lapius' work, so I think his books were only published in the
United States. We usually think of "Railroad" as American
English and "Railway" as British English, so it's natural to think
that a book with the title "Railway" found in Wales was
published in Britain, but the truth is that the two terms Railway/
Railroad are used on both sides of the Atlantic, even if Railroad
slightly predominates in the United States and Railway slightly
predominates in Britain."[ OCLC = Online Computer Library Center
http://www.oclc.org/home/RLIN = Research Libraries Information Network
http://www.rlg.org/rlin.htmlAnother web search turned up a reference to a two-page
poem by S. Q. Lapius in The New England Magazine on 1895
titled "Along the Dust White River Road"Combining this fact with Len and John's notes lends
credence to the supposition that "S. Q. Lapius" was the pen
name of a poet/doctor whose real name may have been Justin
Allis Garvin.So what does all this mean? For one, you find an amazing
amount of information on the Internet these days, but it
is only just a start. It can also lead you down blind alleys at
the speed of light. The real work still has to be done offline.
And there is no substitute for getting a copy of a book in
question and reading what's in it. Despite the fact that the
book is likely to contain poetry, the numismatic reference
still has me curious to see a copy. Here's where the Internet
comes in handy again. I located a copy through an online
bookseller and ordered it - it turned out not to be expensive.
I'll have more to report when the book arrives. -Editor]- 2003-05-04
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