• Title: Stories of the Great Hymns of the Church
• Author: Silas H. Paine
• Publisher: Flexo Printing Company
• Estimated year of printing: 1926

Notes:

When it comes to antique books, religious books are amongst the most common.  The Bible itself is the most-printed book in history, and so is fairly easy to come by form any era.  Other religious texts, such as hymnals and prayer books, also are fairly common as well — as soon as people could handwrite manuscripts, the emphasis was on religious texts, which were then passed down through generations, and continued to be the emphasis with each new technological improvement in book printing.  

This book is pretty interesting.  Published in 1926, it’s not a hymnal, but rather is a book about hymns.  It contains historical information about 805 hymns — often just a brief anecdote, sometimes multi-page history.  It’s not entirely clear where the information in these histories comes from, but the introduction, by Luther Wishard, indicates that this book was the result of 40 years of hymnology by Paine.

Besides being interested in hymns, Paine was an executive at Standard Oil, working for John Rockefeller.  He became wealthy from that position, and purchased and developed a great deal of property at Silver Bay in Hague, New York, eventually founding the Silver Bay Association.

Luther Wishard, the writer of the introduction to this book, was the first full time staff member of the YMCA organization.  In that role, he convinced Paine to donate a building in Silver Bay to be used for YMCA conferences.

Historical context:

This book was printed in 1926, the same year that Queen Elizabeth II, Marilyn Monroe, and Fidel Castro were born.  It was also the year that Harry Houdini, Claude Monet, and Annie Oakley died.