BYLOW HILL
(New York: Charles Scribner s Sons, 1902).
FIRST EDITION. Leaving his trademark southern localities for a change, Cable sets this story in a small and quaint New England town in the late nineteenth century. Bylow Hill tells of a web of relationships between a number of the inhabitants, but the focus is on two families in particular the Byingtons and the Winslows. The young people of these families, including Ruth and Leonard Byington and Arthur and Godfrey Winslow, must all face the realities of love, loyalty, and loss. George W. Cable strikes a personal chord with his touching story based on his adoptive town of Northampton, Massachusetts. Cable moved there in 1885 after the results of publishing two essays encouraging racial equality and the consequent blow-back in his native Louisiana. Item #26710
First edition. Illustrated with six atmospheric plates in colour by F. C. Yohn. 8vo, in the original bright red cloth, featuring a Margaret Armstrong art nouveau design on the upper cover of flowers depicted in black and gilt with a coiled gilt snake at the base, the spine similarly decorated in gilt and black and gilt lettered. 215 pp. A fine copy, bright and clean and attractive. The Armstrong binding with just a hint of mellowing at the spine and the lightest touch of shelving evidence at the tips.