Jump to content
Main menu
Main menu
move to sidebar
hide
Navigation
Main page
Recent changes
Random page
Help about MediaWiki
Special pages
Niidae Wiki
Search
Search
Appearance
Create account
Log in
Personal tools
Create account
Log in
Pages for logged out editors
learn more
Contributions
Talk
Editing
Prairie City, Illinois
(section)
Page
Discussion
English
Read
Edit
View history
Tools
Tools
move to sidebar
hide
Actions
Read
Edit
View history
General
What links here
Related changes
Page information
Appearance
move to sidebar
hide
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
==The Decker Press== From 1937 to 1950, Prairie City was home to the [[Decker Press]], which in the mid-1940s was the largest publishing house in America devoted exclusively to putting out poetry. The business was not financially successful, and its founder, Prairie City native James A. Decker, sold it to a local lumber dealer, Harry M. Denman, who in turn sold it several months later to Ervin Tax, a poet from Chicago. Decker left town, but his sister, Dorothy, remained. Tax tried to make the business more efficient and profitable—buying new presses and binding equipment and hiring an artist, sales promoter and other employees. But the Decker Press came to a tragic end in May 1950 when Dorothy, who had fallen in love with Tax in a one-side relationship, shot Tax in the head with a rifle and then killed herself.<ref name="DeckerPress">{{cite web|url=http://www.connectotel.com/patchen/deckjh.html|title=Poetry and Murder: Prairie City's Decker Press|accessdate=June 23, 2016}}</ref>
Summary:
Please note that all contributions to Niidae Wiki may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see
Encyclopedia:Copyrights
for details).
Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)
Search
Search
Editing
Prairie City, Illinois
(section)
Add topic