Don't BLOG a Book by its Cover

Well, actually, that's exactly what I'm gonna do!

Last week I had to purchase a lot of fourteen old books on eBay to get ONE that I wanted. The lot was poorly presented - just titles and a quick, dark photo of all the spines. But it listed a book I wanted. I bid. And I won. 

They just arrived. And after pulling out the book I'd been bidding on, I took a few minutes to see what other stuff was in the box. It was pretty much a lot of old crap: forgotten novels, cheap reprints of old poems, a few religious tracts. Eric was sitting beside me as I showed him the box of mediocre loot and he said, "Any of those have Denslow cover designs?"

I said I doubted it, that the only one with a halfway decent cover was a budget reprint of J. M. Barrie's novel A Window in Thrums. I pulled the book from the foot-high stack to show Eric and I said something like, "Well I'll be hornswoggled! It IS a Denslow cover!"

From what I can tell in the W. W. Denslow bibliography, this is a "stock" cover design that Denslow did for the publisher Donohue, Henneberry & Co. in 1899. It has been reported on several different books, including George Elliot's Adam Bede and Victor Hugo's Hans of Iceland. I have not actually seen any of these others so can't tell if the colors or imagery might have been different.

As you can see, Denslow provided a handsome but generic cover design. The main motif seems to be an assortment of wax seals and it's printed in jade green and dark red. Denslow's seahorse monogram appears in the lower right corner of the scroll on the front cover.

Hooray for accidental acquisitions!