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Description

Up For Sale Today is

Walden,
Or,
Life In The Woods

by

Henry David Thoreau

Illustrated by

Amelia M. Watson
Book design by
Sarah Wyman Whitman

Hardcover. 12mo. Published by Houghton Mifflin and Company, Boston, MA. 1897. 259, 261 pgs. Illustrated. First, thus. 

Art Nouveau book cover design by Sarah Wyman Whitman, among the most important women book designers in America. Bound in green cloth with gilt titles and decoration to upper panel and spine; lower panel blind-stamped with upper panel design. Top edge gilt. Boards have shelf-wear present to the extremities (spines are faded). Previous owner's name present to the FFEP. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. 

The autobiographical and, at the same time, literary account of Thoreau’s two-year life in a self-built log cabin at a forest lake in the wilderness of Massachusetts has become a classic of alternative life drafts. It is not a novel in the proper sense, but a literary work of his diary entries and notes. Thoreau, in his contemplations, devotes himself to various aspects of human existence; he reflects on economics, loneliness, the animals of the forest, and the importance of reading classical literary works. "Walden" is one of the most influential books in American literary history.

FROM WIKIPEDIA:

Sarah de St. Prix Wyman Whitman (1842–1904) was an American stained glass artist, painter, and book cover designer. Successful at a time when few women had professional art careers, she founded her own firm, Lily Glass Works. Her stained glass windows are found in churches and colleges throughout the northeastern United States. As a member of the board of the Harvard University "Annex," she helped to found Radcliffe College.

Whitman is considered one of the most prominent book-cover designers of her day, often ranked with Margaret Neilson Armstrong and Alice Cordelia Morse. Beginning around 1884, over the course of two decades she designed the illustrations and covers of over 200 books, occasionally including some version of her own 'flaming heart' logo. She was the first professional woman artist to work regularly for Houghton Mifflin. She designed books by authors such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Celia Thaxter, and especially her friend Sarah Orne Jewett.

Although her aesthetic drew heavily on the Arts and Crafts Movement, her designs were almost radical in their minimalism, leaving substantially more negative space than was typical. Her spare designs featured elegant linear drawings or silhouettes (usually of plants) and sometimes an asymmetrical composition. Colors tended towards a muted palette of greens, golds, and deep reds. Her designs helped to spark a trend towards a more minimal aesthetic for book covers.

Whitman considered that the designer's challenge was to create an aesthetically satisfying experience within the constraints imposed by the economics of book publishing. As she put it:

"You have got to think how to apply elements of design to these cheaply sold books; to put the touch of art on this thing that is going to be produced at a level price, which allows for no handwork, the decoration to be cut with a die, the books to go out by the thousand and to be sold at a low price. . . What I feel is that under these conditions, the more necessary it is to design covers well because they are really like aesthetic tracts. They go everywhere."

 

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Book formats and corresponding sizes  
Name Abbreviations Leaves Pages Approximate cover size (width × height)  
inches cm  
folio 2º or fo 2 4 12 × 19 30.5 × 48  
quarto 4º or 4to 4 8 9½ × 12 24 × 30.5  
octavo 8º or 8vo 8 16 6 × 9 15 × 23  
duodecimo or twelvemo 12º or 12mo 12 24 5 × 7⅜ 12.5 × 19  
sextodecimo or sixteenmo 16º or 16mo 16 32 4 × 6¾ 10 × 17  
octodecimo or eighteenmo 18º or 18mo 18 36 4 × 6½ 10 × 16.5  
trigesimo-secundo or thirty-twomo 32º or 32mo 32 64 3½ × 5½ 9 × 14  
quadragesimo-octavo or forty-eightmo 48º or 48mo 48 96 2½ × 4 6.5 × 10  
sexagesimo-quarto or sixty-fourmo 64º or 64mo 64 128 2 × 3 5 × 7.5  
 

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