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First Edition, first impression, first state. Hard cover, 12 mo, in publisher's original linen-weave indigo blue cloth, decorated with images of three anchors, dolphins and Tudor roses to the front board blocked in gray, (artist initials WJ )and the titles in gold to front and spine. Lacking dust jacket. Top edge stained grey, other edges untrimmed. Copyright verso title page states March 1904; Supino identifies this as the first state. Illustrated with tissue-guarded frontispiece in black and white by the artist Charles M. Macauley, plus an additional seven unpaginated illustrations on coated paper opposite pages of text.**CONDITION: Near Fine. A small closed tear in the center of the frontis tissue guard (half inch.) One small closed tear repaired at top of first page publisher's catalogue. Otherwise, very clean, tight and mildly toned. Lacking dust jacket. Now in mylar. **COLLATION: unsigned, [i -x][1-3] 4-428pp. [8pp. publisher's catalogue.] **Ohio-born ARTIST CHARLES R. MACCAULEY (1871-1934), was a freelance illustrator, one-time animated cartoonist, and eventually a nationally-recognized political cartoonist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1930 for the political cartoon "Paying for a Dead Horse, which appeared in print in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1929. Aside from political cartoons, published in newspapers in Cleveland, New York and Philadelphia, his political commentary extended to filmmaking, in supporting Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt. His obituary states he had friendships with a number of important politicians of the day, among them his godfather Pres. McKinley, and Presidents Taft, Wilson and Roosevelt.**"Romance" CO-AUTHOR, FORD MADOX HUEFFER, (1873-1939), aka Ford Madox Ford from 1919, later adopted the name of his famous grandfather, the Pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Madox Brown. He was also related through the maternal line to William Michael Rosetti's wife Lucy Madox Brown. Living near the Romney Marsh, in Kent, Hueffer became friends with the area's literary circle who included the authors Henry James, Stephen Crane and H.G.Wells as well as a somewhat impoverished Joseph Conrad around the turn of the twentieth century. Conrad's early supporter and editor, Edward Garnett introduced Conrad and Hueffer in 1898, and their work "Romance," was their second joint publishing effort. It had some commercial success, helping the financially-struggling Joseph Conrad whose earlier titles had met with critical acclaim yet left the author in financial peril. **AN ADVENTURE STORY which begins in England, then continues in the West Indies, Cuba and finally back to England, "Romance" has a complex political plot and a large international cast of characters: Jamaican, Cuban, English, Scottish, Irish, Spanish and Mexican. The action involves the competing interests to Jamaica's sugar trade, and how commercial and colonial policies become corrupted by greed. A young Englishman, John Kemp, the down-at-heels grandson of an unidentified Earl, is eager to escape a quotidian existence, and plans to travel to Jamaica to learn the ropes of running the Horton Pen sugar plantation, owned by the Rooksby family, whose scion, Edward Rooksby, has just married his sister, Veronica. On the way to the ship, he is the victim of a case of mistaken identity and becomes a wanted man, initiating a relationship with a couple of mysterious marauders, Don Carlos and his retainer Castro. Don Carlos has a remote family connection to Kemp, and encourages him to join him at a secret pirate base at Rio Medio, Jamaica. Once arrived in Jamaica, Admiral Rowley's English warship is too large to effectively engage with the smaller pirate vessels which plague the seas, secretly supported by foreign officials in Cuba. John becomes aware of the divisive social and political environment. Slavery, which powers the local commerce, is condemned at home in England (outlawed in 1834,) but a local Jamaican Separatist faction of planters and the Irish ex-pat revolutionary O'Brien, become aligned in the desire to thwart the British by means of secession to the United States, where slave labor still remains legal. A romantic subplot joins John Kemp and Seraphina, daughter to a Castillian trader of influence, Don Ramon Balthasar, in Kingston, with piratical connections... A very good read.**REFS: C.R. MacCauley, obituary 11/25/1934, Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Lohf and Sheehey, 120. Keating, 57, edition only. Supino A9.6.0 and Plate 9 (on the right.)
Ref: CONRD 9231
$225.00 $191.25