As a part of my ill-advised development of a virtual book look for this site, I dug out some of the older books I have here and there about the house. The pages that made it into the final product came from an 1894 copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island published by Charles Scribner’s Sons as pat of a multivolume compendium of the man’s work. I didn’t notice as I scanned the book, but there is a two-color facsimile of young Jim’s map just prior to the frontmatter. Maybe I’ll share that here too.

One of the other books I found is an intriguing edition of William Morris’ unreadable utopian fantasy, News from Nowhere. As I flipped through it, I didn’t see a page or type worth cribbing from, but then I remembered that I’d purchased it because of the very faded, illegible reproductions of four agitprop drawings, presumably by Morris, probably from the 1880s. The drawings are intriguingly hard to see in the book, when held in the hand and peered at. They appear to have been printed in yellow ink on what may have been at one time faintly lavender paper. The inexpensive stock has faded to the familiar manila of old paper, nearly exactly the same shade as the yellow ink. I recall thinking as I bought the book that it would be an interesting challenge to work on scans of the endpapers.

Well, I’ve done so, and you may view the results by clicking on the banner at the top of his entry. The drawings are interesting because Morris is such a gifted draftsman; they are also somewhat odd to our post-Soviet eyes in the manner in which they idealize and fuss over images familiar from both later patriotic art and socialist poster design.