Green Mansions: A Romance Of the Tropical Forest by Hudson, W.H - 1944

New York: Random House, 1944 This is my third encounter with this very special book. It disappointed me that I was deprived of Rima the Bird Girl until adulthood, but I did learn about this female variation on Tarzan and read Hudson's book at a relatively early age. My next introduction was to a copy of the 1944 Random House edition in extremely bad condition; even so, I fell in love and learned about the illustrator, E. McKnight Kauffer, a cubist painter who was also possibly one of the best commercial artists who ever lived. He did an absolutely beautiful series of posters for American Airlines displaying regional America and he did the illustrations for Hudson's book. Upon acquiring this current copy, I noted that Hudson's work had been first published way back in 1916, but somehow in 1944 Random House had had the genius to produce this special edition with illustrations by Kauffer. I explored further, and that was my introduction to Stefan Salter, "among the first graphic designers in the history of the field to show consistently over decades, that the face of a book could be as beautiful, as thought-provoking, as meaningful, as its prose." (Clip Kidd). And Salter, in fact, lead me to this William Morris quote unearthed by B.N. Goswamy: "a book, printed or written, has a tendency to be a beautiful object . that we of this age should generally produce ugly books, shows, I fear, something like malice pretence - a determination to put our eyes in our pockets whenever we can .". And that, dear readers is the book on offer today: Without the slipcase and only in VG+ condition, I'm afraid, but still very very beautiful. The spine is worn and stained and the corners are bumped. The pages are browning from age. Other than the wish that Random House had sprung for acid-free paper, there are no other complaints. There is some slight wear where the yellow spine cover meets the dark green mottled boards with the stylised yellow outline of a female head and one small mark on the decorative dark green and black front endpaper. The introduction by John Galsworthy, the colour plates, frontispiece and many line drawings with green highlights by Kauffer are in fine condition. If you are fond of art deco and the midcentury modern style, this book will please you very much.