Simplicity and Tolstoy, G K Chesterton 1912, Morrell Binding. This book is titled “Simplicity And Tolstoy”, written by G. K. Chesterton, and published in London by Arthur L. Humphreys in 1912, in a fine binding by Morrell in London and by Charles E Lauriat in Boston, and the book is a first edition, according to WorldCat. The book has full red morocco covers, five raised bands, six gilt-ruled compartments with gilt lettering and gilt dots in the corners of the panels, a gilt-ruled border, gilt lettering, and gilt dots in the corners on the front board, three gilt-fillet borders with blue-gray endpapers and “Morrell, Binder, London” in small gilt letters at the bottom of the front paste-down and “Charles E Lauriat Of Boston” in small gilt letters at the bottom of the rear paste-down, a half-title, vignette title page, and a regular title page with the title in red letters, one page of Contents, including a chapter on William Morris, 85 pages of text, with small vignettes at the beginning and end of each chapter, deckled edges, and the top edge is gilt, and the raised bands have designs that extend onto the covers and look like hinges that open a door or a book. G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936) was an English writer, philosopher, and literary and art critic, and he created the fictional priest detective Father Brown that appears on PBS on the weekends. Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an orthodox Christian and came to identify this position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting from high-church Anglicanism. Biographers have identified him as a successor to Victorian authors such as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin, and his writings were an influence on Jorge Luis Borges, who compared his literature with that of Edgar Allan Poe. As a young man he became fascinated with the occult and, along with his brother Cecil, experimented with Ouija boards. Chesterton attended the Slade School of Art in London to become an illustrator and took classes in literature, but he did not complete a degree in either subject. A friend from schooldays was Edmund Clerihew Bentley, inventor of the clerihew, a whimsical four-line biographical poem. Chesterton himself wrote clerihews and illustrated his friend's first published collection of poetry, Biography for Beginners, from 1905; it usually was a short comic or nonsensical verse, typically in two rhyming couplets with lines of unequal length and referring to a famous person. For example, the first line names a person and the second line ends with something that rhymes with the name of the person, and the remainder puts the subject in an absurd light or reveals something unknown or spurious about the subject. One of the most remembered clerihews from Bentley's collection is “Sir Humphrey Davy abominated gravy. He lived in the odium of having discovered sodium. Oh, is that bad … odious. And for what it’s worth, Humphrey Davy discovered nitrous oxide - laughing gas. Chesterton was a large man, standing 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighing around 20 stone 6 pounds (286 lb). His girth gave rise to an anecdote during the First World War, when a lady in London asked why he was not "out at the Front"; he replied, "If you go round to the side, you will see that I am.” Chesterton wrote about 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4000 essays (mostly newspaper columns), and several plays, and he was a Catholic apologist and mystery writer. (An apologist is someone who defends religious doctrines through systematic argumentation and discourse.) The book measures 5 3/4 x 4 5/8 in. wide, with a tight binding and clean pages and text for the most part; a few pages have faint brown spots in the margins and that’s it, and there’s light rubbing along the edges of the spine and at the tips, and an interesting book by an interesting author. #201 #1564