Amish Love: Adventures in a Puritan Cult

Florence, Italy: Michael Angelino Press, 1930. Blaine, Mahlon. Small quarto. 264pp. With woodcut cover illustration and five erotic, half-tone reproductions of paintings by Mahlon Blaine. This book is part of the swelling trend in the 1930s for "privately printed" erotic books, which would often be published by anonymous or pseudonymous authors and illustrators and printed with fake publication information in order to protect the creators from public backlash. This erotic tale, supposedly taken from a diary of an Amish woman telling of the scandalous sexual exploits of her mother, is one such work. Blaine's stirring illustrations bring life to the text, combining sensual lines with cunning details. Both the cover, in Blaine's bold woodcut style, and the illustrations, with their broad washes over sketched lines, have a raw quality to them, a sense of hurried energy that echoes the excitement of the reader. Near fine in wrappers, with spotting, crease to front cover, and scratch to back. Blaine, whose most respectable and recognizable works were illustrations for Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Steinbeck, and the New Yorker, published over two thousand drawings between 1917 and his death in 1969. An interesting work from this underappreciated master. (Trenary, "Mahlon Blaine, One-Eyed Visionary," p. 59).