Eighteenth Century Poetry and Prose, Deco Cloth Binding, c. 1939–1955

The Piece

Eighteenth Century Poetry and Prose, edited by Louis I. Bredvold, Alan D. McKillop and Lois Whitney, published by The Ronald Press Company, New York. Olive linen over boards, printed rather than stamped, in dark brown.

The cover is the reason to look twice. A flat geometric grid runs the full board: broad ruled bands crossing at the quarters, panels of fine parallel hatching, the whole thing squared off and architectural in a way that owes more to a 1930s building facade than to anything in the eighteenth century. At the center sits an oval medallion, the title set in a brown field between two panels of stylized foliate ornament. The spine carries the same scheme in miniature, with the title, the three editors and the Ronald imprint at the tail. The rear board is plain olive.

The title page sits inside a decorative rule border of small repeating ornaments. Bredvold is given as University of Michigan, McKillop as The Rice Institute, Whitney as Russell Sage College. The copyright page reads Copyright, 1939, by The Ronald Press Company, with the Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 39-7291 and the line Printed in the United States of America. There is no printing statement.

The table of contents is a reading list for the whole period. Samuel Butler from Hudibras, Pepys from the Diary, Rochester's A Satire Against Mankind, then a long run of Dryden: Absalom and Achitophel, Mac Flecknoe, The Medal, Religio Laici, The Hind and the Panther, Alexander's Feast, the song for St Cecilia's Day, the lines printed under the engraved portrait of Milton in Tonson's folio Paradise Lost of 1688. Then Sir William Temple on poetry, and onward. Pope's The Rape of the Lock sits at page 357.

A student had this book and worked in it. The Rape of the Lock carries pencil notes in the margins and words underlined in the text, the kind of annotation a person makes while someone is talking at the front of a room. On the front free endpaper, in ink and in careful block capitals, an owner's name: Vera Louise Hunt.

History & Provenance

Three scholars made this, and they were the right three.

Lois Whitney was born in Oberlin, Ohio on 14 October 1892 and died in February 1982. She took a bachelor's and a master's at the University of Chicago, taught at Grinnell, studied at Radcliffe, and returned to Chicago for a doctorate in 1921 on eighteenth century primitivist theories of the origins of epic. She taught at Minnesota, then Goucher, then Vassar from 1926. A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1929 funded the work that became her 1934 book on primitivism and the idea of progress in eighteenth century English popular literature. She moved to Russell Sage College in 1937, was made full professor in 1947 and retired in 1958. She painted as well, in oil, watercolor and silk screen, and showed the work locally and nationally.

Louis I. Bredvold held the chair in English at the University of Michigan and wrote The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden, which is why the Dryden section here is as long and as well chosen as it is. Alan Dugald McKillop taught at the Rice Institute in Houston and was the leading American authority on Samuel Richardson and the early English novel.

What they produced in 1939 became the standard survey anthology of the period for American college courses and stayed in use for decades. A generation of students met Dryden, Pope, Swift and Johnson in these pages. The marginalia in the Pope is that history showing itself: not a collector's book, a working one.

On the date. The copyright is 1939 and nothing on the copyright page identifies which printing this is. That makes 1939 a floor and nothing more. The anthology was reprinted repeatedly through the 1940s and 1950s from the same plates, so the range given here is an estimate and the book is not offered as a first printing.

The owner's name does not resolve. A search of the newspaper record for Vera Louise Hunt returns thirty two scattered matches between 1931 and 1987, across Mississippi, Texas, Indiana, Nebraska and Illinois, with nothing that converges on a student of English literature. Her name is here and that is all anyone can say.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Buy this one for the board. Printed cloth from the late thirties is a different animal from stamped cloth, and this is a good example of it: a flat, hard-edged, confidently modern grid in brown on olive, made to sell a book about Dryden and Pope to undergraduates and accidentally producing one of the better-looking covers of its decade. It reads as graphic design, not as decoration, and it sits comfortably with midcentury furniture in a way that almost no other period book does.

Olive is also a color that does real work. It goes with walnut, brass, black metal, leather and ochre, and it is nearly impossible to find on a book spine that is not either a military manual or a federal document.

The content holds up on its own terms. It is a serious anthology assembled by three first-rank scholars, one of them a woman with a Guggenheim and a doctorate from Chicago at a time when that was rare, and the student notes in the Pope give it the one thing a clean copy cannot have. Shelve it, stack it, or leave it open at the medallion on a table.