Flora and Sylva
This week we present Houghton Mifflin’s own 1988 reprint of its original 1894 printing of American author Celia Thaxter’s An Island Garden, with illustrations by the American impressionist painter Childe Hassam and a new introduction by philosopher and garden writer Allen Lacy. The publisher’s note states:
In March 1894, Houghton Milfflin published the first edition -- one thousand copies -- of An Island Garden, the last and best book Celia Thaxter wrote. A second printing of one thousand copies was published in November 1894, a few months after her death, and the book was declared out of print in 1902. Although an edition without illustrations was brought our two years later, this is the first reissue by Houghton Mifflin of the famous Childe Hassam edition.
The paintings commissioned for An Island Garden are considered by many to be the most beautiful of Childe Hassam’s career . . . .
In the original edition, Hassam’s paintings and chapter headings were reproduced by chromolithography, an expensive and painstaking process of color printing in use during the second half of the nineteenth century. . . . [The chromolithographs] were made at Armstrong & Company. The book’s gold-stamped cover, which is reproduce in this edition, was designed by Sarah Wyman Whitman.
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