Elbert
Green Hubbard was an American philosopher and writer. He is perhaps most famous
for his essay A Message to Garcia. He
was born in Bloomington, Illinois and founded Roycroft, an Arts and Crafts movement
community in East Aurora, New York in 1895. This grew from his private press,
the Roycroft Press, which was inspired by William Morrisęs Kelmscott Press. (Although
called the "Roycroft Press" by latter-day collectors and print historians, the
organization called itself "The Roycrofters" and "The Roycroft Shops.") Hubbard
edited and published two magazines, "The Philistine" and "The Fra." "The Philistine"
was bound in brown butcher paper and full of satire and whimsy. (Hubbard himself
quipped that the cover was butcher paper because "There is meat inside.") The
Roycrofters produced handsome, if sometimes eccentric, books printed on handmade
paper, and operated a fine bindery, a furniture shop, and shops producing modeled
leather and hammered copper goods. They were a leading producer of "Mission-style"
products. Hubbard's
second wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, was a graduate of the New Thought-oriented Emerson
College of Oratory in Boston and a noted suffragist, and the Roycroft Shops became
a site for meetings and conventions of radicals, freethinkers, reformers and suffragists.
Hubbard
became a popular lecturer, and his homespun philosophy evolved from a loose William
Morris-inspired socialism to an ardent defense of free enterprise and American
know-how. Hubbard was much mocked in the press for "selling out."
In 1915 Hubbert and his wife died in the sinking of RMS Lusitania, and the Roycroft
community went into a gradual decline. 14
original Roycroft buildings are located in the area of South Grove and Main Street
in East Aurora. Known as the "Roycroft Campus", this rare survival of an art colony
was awarded National Historic Landmark status in 1986. The
Elbert Hubbard Roycroft Museum in East Aurora is the main collection and research
centre for the work of the Roycrofters. | 
