The Hearth and Eagle by Anya Seton, Houghton Mifflin, Scarlet Cloth and Gilt, 1948

The Piece

Anya Seton's The Hearth and Eagle in the 1948 Houghton Mifflin edition, bound in the publisher's scarlet cloth with the title stamped in gilt on the front board and spine, the title page carrying the Houghton Mifflin dolphin and anchor device between the numerals 19 and 48. A substantial octavo of some four hundred pages, the sort of book that was bought in hardcover the month it came out and read by the fire it is named for. The scarlet cloth has kept its color on the boards, the gilt is bright and legible, the text block is square and tight, and the pages are clean and toned to a warm cream at the edges. It is offered without a dust jacket.

Condition is very good for a reading copy of its age: light rubbing to the spine ends and corners, mild toning to the page edges, a sound binding with no cracked hinges, no foxing of note, no inscriptions or stamps found and no tears or losses to the text. A clean, handsome copy of a popular novel in its original binding.

History & Provenance

Anya Seton was the daughter of the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton and the writer Grace Gallatin Seton, and from her first novel in 1941 she became one of the most widely read American historical novelists of the century, the author of Dragonwyck, which Hollywood filmed with Vincent Price in 1946, and later of Katherine and The Winthrop Woman. The Hearth and Eagle, published by Houghton Mifflin of Boston on November 19, 1948, is her New England novel: the story of the Honeywood family of Marblehead, Massachusetts, from the founding of the town in the 1630s to the end of the nineteenth century, told through Hesper Honeywood and the three men who claim her, with the family's inn, the Hearth and Eagle, standing at the center of the book as the symbol of the town itself. Seton researched it in Marblehead over two years, and the novel is still read there as the town's own.

Houghton Mifflin in 1948 did not print a first-printing statement; its first editions are identified by the date on the title page agreeing with the copyright date, with no later printing noted, and this copy carries the 1948 title page and the scarlet cloth and gilt binding of the first trade edition. The dating rests on the imprint rather than style alone: the 1948 title page and the publisher's binding date the book to 1948.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A scarlet cloth novel with gilt on the spine is the book that finishes a shelf. It reads as a flash of red among the browns and greens of an old library, stacks under a lamp or a small bronze on a side table, and sits naturally in a cottage, a cape, a study or a guest room where someone might actually pick it up and read it by the fire. It is a natural gift for a reader of historical fiction, for anyone with Marblehead or the North Shore in the family, or for a collector of Seton's novels in their original bindings. For a shop or designer client it is the period hardcover with a real title and a real story that styles a bookcase and sells on the color.