c1900 Front Wraps of Chatto & Windus Sixpenny Novels

Description

Colour Plates, Illustrated, Original Binding, Very Scarce

A unique and very scarce volume, containing a total of one-hundred and thirty-eight front wraps from Chatto & Windus' 'Sixpenny Novels' series.

This series was published from 1893, and produced cheap printings of brilliant novels by eminent authors. These include 'The Moonstone' and 'Woman in White' by Wilkie Collins, 'Therese Raquin' and 'L'Assommoir' by Emile Zola, 'The Cloister and the Hearth' by Charles Reade 'Under the Greenwood Tree' by Thomas Hardy, 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' by Mark Twain', all of which are included in this volume, and more. 

Each front wrap colourfully and dramatically illustrated a scene from the novel, by a variety of artists. 

Bookplate of Christopher MacLehose to the front paste down, with his inscription "For Carmen with huge love from Christopher MacLehose and Koukla, 15.vii.88". MacLehose is a British publisher who worked at Harvill Press, and founded MacLehose Press. Described as "the champion of translated fiction", he published the works of Raymond Carver, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Bulgakov, Stieg Larsson, Haruki Murakami, and more.

Bookplate of Carmen Callil to the recto of the front endpaper. Carmen Callil was an Australian publisher who founded Virago Press in 1973, to "publish books which celebrated women and women's lives, and which would, by so doing, spread the message of women's liberation to the whole population". Virago publish works by new and neglected female authors, publishing the works by authors such as Daphne du Maurier, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Margaret Atwood, and Angela Carter, all with a distinctive green spine synonymous with Virago.