Violet Books

Kirk Munro's At War with Pontiac; or, The Totem of the Bear: A Tale of Redcoat & Redskin (New York: Scribners, 1895) is seen here with a very striking pictorial binding showing an armed Indian on rocky ledge. There's also an array of weapons & snowshoes depicted on the spine. Within there's a tissued frontispiece & seven additional illustration plates by J. Finnemore, savagely beautiful and full of drama. A tale of Indian Wars around the Great Lakes region, including some slight supernaturalism, tons of action & romance, all rather inspired by Cooper.

Frederick A. Ober was a popular boys' adventure novelist. With Osceola in Florida, Being the Adventures of Two Boys in the Seminole War in 1835 (New York: Burt, 1908) sports a handsome pictorial binding of an Indian and youth in canoe. There's also an Indian's profile on spine, plus six dramatic interior illustration plates and one vignette by J. Watson Davis. The Seminole Wars are in high gear -- they were the only tribe never subjugated by Europeans! A white lad's life is saved by Osceola and a friendship between those who might have been foes is forged.

Mary Catherine Crowley is the author of A Daughter of New France, With Some Account of the Gallant Sicur Cadillac & his Colony on the Detroit (Boston: Little Brown, 1901). The first edition has an art nouveau binding, tissued frontispiece, and five other illustration plates by Clyde O' De Land, having the same evocative power as old black-&-white swashbuckler movies. This is a tale of action and romance set in the 1680s France and Quebec plus pioneer Detroit amidst the Algonquin Indians.

Samuel Shellabarger was one of the last authors of the classic age of the swashbuckler which began in the 1890s with Stanley Weyman. The King's Cavalier (Boston: Little Brown, 1950) is here shown in its striking first edition dustwrapper. The book has also map endpapers showing the routes followed by Blaise de Lalliere, a soldier of Francis I, and Milady Anne Russell, who is "striking rather than pretty, with fine, bold features, & with the strangest eyes ever seen in a woman," in flight across the Bourbon Provinces. Imagination and scholarship join forces in this swashbuckler set in France in 1523, & which features such supporting cast as Francois the Sorcerer & Thibault the King's torturer.

Emma-Lindsay Squier was a world-traveller who wrote many, many short stories for magazines about pirates of the Carribean, ancient China, the Northwest and Canadian wilderness, among so many other subjects and settings. Some of her tales were collected in books, and an ideal example is The Bride of the Sacred Well and Other Tales of Ancient Mexico (New York: Cosmpolitan, 1928). These are excellent weird fantasies of Mesoamerica inspired by her Mexican sojourns, about which the author provides introduction. Her headnotes to each story tie the tales to things she experienced or places she saw.

The back cover of Emma-Lindsay Squier's The Bride of the Sacred Well is distinct from the pictorial front, two marvelous heroic fantasy paintings by James E. Allen, the great illustrator probably best remembered as the first great dinosaur painter. There are additionally, inside the book, four stunning illustration plates plus decorative vignettes by the same author.

Josiah M. Ward authored Come with me into Babylon: A Story of the Fall of Nineveh (New York: Stokes, 1902). The first edition has this pictorial front board. The story amounts to Heroic Fantasy with magic and mysticism in the ancient world. The book also features eight beautiful illustration plates by James E. McBurney & W. B. Gilbert.

Belshazzar by H. Rider Haggard is seen here in its Doubleday first edition dustwrapper (1930), published some while after Rider's death. It is an ancient world Heroic Fantasy founded upon biblical apocrypha and supporting historic documents.

Nathan Gallizier's The Sorceress of Rome (Boston: Page, 1907) is an historical fantasy of Rome at the end of the 10th Century, having supernatural sequences sufficient that this one made it onto Ev Bleiler's supernatural checklist. It is also a sequel to another of his historical romances, Castel del Mantle. This rare dustwrapper is designed around one of the interior illustration plates done by the Kinneys.

Here's what's underneath the dustwrapper for Gallizier's The Sorceress of Rome, a fine ornate art nouveau design. Within are pictorial endpapers and four full color tipped-in plates by the magnificent Kinneys, among the greatest artists of the Golden Age of Book Illustration; plus black and white decorations by P. Verburg.

Here's the dustwrapper for the first edition of Nathan Gallizier's The Leopard Prince: A Romance of Venice in the Fourteenth Century, at the Period of the Bosnian Conspiracy (Boston: Page, 1920). Following the publisher's habit of creating elegant editions for Gallizier's swashbuckling romances, the interior features decorative devices by P. Verburg; four color plates by the magnificent Kinneys; and pictorial endpapers by Carl Lagervist. A gorgeous book for a gorgeous story.

Gallizier's The Court of Lucifer: A Tale of the Renaissance (Boston: Page, 1910) is seen here in its rare dustwrapper which covers a decoratived binding. Within are pictorial endpapers and four full tipped-in color plates by the Kinneys. This is the third in a trilogy of historical fantasies, this concluding volume featuring Lucrezia Borgia, her brother Cesare, their father, and Pople Alexander VI, having sequences of witchcraft and the macabre.