Cleveland: The Goldsmith Publishing Company (Barse and Hopkins), 1918-1919. Very Good / Very Good. Item #9859

Cleveland: The Goldsmith Publishing Company (Barse and Hopkins), 1918-1919. Early reprints, probably from the late 1920s, by a co-publisher of Barse and Hopkins'. Octavo (19.5x13x3cm); Helen America 217pp; Marieken Belgium 224pp + 1p of publisher's prospectuses; Phoebe Canada 221pp + 2pp of publisher's prospectuses. Each with full-page illustrations by Charles L. Wrenn (1880-1952): Helen merited four of them; Marieken and Phoebe each got three.

Pictorial jackets with docked flaps, as published. Helen in tan linen with black spine and front panel lettering, and blind-stamped front-panel publisher's emblems; Marieken in sage-grey linen with black spine and front-panel lettering, and blind-stamped front panel publisher's emblems; Phoebe in olive green cloth with black spine and front-panel lettering—but no blind-stamped publisher's emblems for Phoebe!

All three volumes show some jacket edgewear, with larger chips missing at the jacket spine foot of Marieken and Phoebe. Textblocks unmarred and unmarked with the exception of the young owner's signature, in pencil, with "Christmas 1930" date, on front free endpapers. Our young first owner, 15 years old when she received these for Christmas, took very good care of her books.

Author "Martha Trent"—it seems likely she was a publisher's collective entity—wrote six novels in the "Somewhere" series, all set in World War I allied countries. (England, France, and Italy are featured in the remainder of the series.) The stories are frothy but with surprisingly serious episodes of life and death encountered by our heroines, the reflection, sometimes direct, sometimes sublimated, of the trench slaughters of World War I, which even the sheltered ears of Martha Trent's young audiences could not help overhearing.

Price: $50.00