The rules outlive the club

Twelve numbered rules, printed in 1927. Much of the show had changed since 1920. The Emblem Club cup's two contradictory descriptions had not.

Twelve numbered rules, and the last two are set apart below because they only mean what they mean together: rule eleven is how flowers are judged at this show — colour, form, size, length of stem — and rule twelve is the exception made for two trophies, which are judged on something else entirely and get tables of their own. The sentence runs past the foot of the column.

Rule four, earlier in the same list, puts the archive back on ground it has walked: “No flower not included in the published list will be eligible for prize, except as a part of the general display of flowers for which the Emblem club cup is offered.” So the general display in one rule and the most artistic arrangement in another, for the same trophy — exactly the pair the Bulletin printed in August 1920.

The general display in one rule, the most artistic arrangement in another, for the same trophy. That is exactly the pair the Bulletin printed in August 1920, and it is what makes this page worth keeping, because almost everything around it moved. Vegetables are gone: 1920 ran a flower and vegetable show, 1927 a flower show. The Library Club sold the entries in 1920; the Woman's Civic League sells them in 1927. In 1920 “no prizes will be given out at the Flower show” and orders went out the morning after; in 1927 “prizes will be given out in the afternoon of the show.” Exhibitors must now grow what they enter, a requirement 1920 did not make. Rule five changed from one exhibit not winning two prizes to one person not entering two exhibits for one prize.

So this is not a premium list reprinted out of laziness. Somebody went through it. They rewrote the selling arrangements, the prize distribution, the eligibility of the grower and the scope of the show, and left the one sentence that had never agreed with itself exactly where it was.

The dates give that its weight. The Emblem Club's stockholders voted to disband in May 1924, after a year of inactivity, and elected directors to sell the Drake property. By August 1927 the club had been gone three years and its building was in other hands. Its cup went on being offered on its terms, in its wording, because the terms worked and nobody was left to be asked about them.