A Hundred Years of Nature's Brotherhood

In 1927 a small green book of fifty-three pages came off a press at 2136 Red Rose Way in Santa Barbara. It was called Nature's Brotherhood, and the name on the title page was Saladin Reps.

Saladin Reps was Paul Reps — thirty years before Zen Flesh, Zen Bones made him one of the most widely read translators of Zen in the world. He was a young man in a town full of seekers, and the press that printed him was the same one printing J. William Lloyd, the old poet-physician of Freedom Hill.

What the book is

Twenty-one short pieces. A bug is sent to school to learn what he already is. A blade of grass is asked how it gives forth such beauty. An elephant named Peter goes back to nature and finds the wild ones have better manners than the tame. A horse, beaten daily, keeps a chant going in his heart. A fly-paper wishes to be burned alive if it would spare one fly.

They read like parables because they are parables, but there is no doctrine in them. The animals are not illustrations of a teaching; they are teachers, and the teaching is that they are already teaching.

The thread back to Lloyd

The Red Rose Press was Lloyd's press. His Scripture of the Serene Life came out under the same imprint, and the 1933 Red Rose catalog offered Nature's Brotherhood alongside it for one dollar, listed simply as "book by Saladin." Two writers, one press, one street, one idea: that the divine is not elsewhere.

The century

1927 to 2027. A hundred years is a long time for a book of animal parables printed in an edition nobody counted. It survived in a handful of library copies — the University of California's, the New York Public Library's — and now in scans of those copies. This site exists so it can be read again, and so the anniversary has somewhere to land.

What we're making for 2027

• This site. The whole book, set in type from the 1927 printing, searchable line by line.
• A reading edition. The text reset with an introduction on Reps, the Red Rose Press, and Santa Barbara in the twenties.
• A centennial reading. In Santa Barbara, ideally near the old Red Rose Way address, with the animal pieces read aloud.
• A short recording. Each piece read aloud, one at a time — they are two or three minutes each, and they were written to be heard.

— with thanks to the libraries that kept the book alive: the University of California and the New York Public Library, and to HathiTrust for the scan.