SCHEU-RIESZ, Helene. Gretchen Discovers America: A Story of Pre-War Types in After-War Lives. London: Dent. 1936. 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s burgundy cloth lettered in yellow to spine and upper board with pictorial city skyline, in the excellent and colourful dust jacket designed by Dorothea Braby. An excellent file copy with file stamp and reference to front endpaper, half-title, title page and final endpapers hole-punched ‘file copy’. The cloth clean, bright and sharp, the binding tight and square, the contents fine otherwise. The dust jacket priced 6s net to front flap, some fading to the spine panel and a couple of small closed tears to extremities, but a sharp example overall.
An early novel by the Austrian author and publisher, which certainly mirrors her own life. At the time of publication, Scheu-Riesz was a popular figure among Austrian and indeed European women’s suffrage, publishing affordable children’s fiction and travelling to England often to collect children’s stories deemed worthy of translation in her homeland. Simultaneously, she was a revered pacifist, representing her country at the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Yet the Nazis were a growing, seemingly uncontrollable concern, and as a Jewish female publisher, she took the wise option to emigrate to the US in 1937, after having visited a year or so earlier. Her protagonist, Gretchen, chooses a similar fate. The dust jacket designer, Dorothea Braby, produced relatively few jackets in this period and is better remembered for her work for the Golden Cockerel Press. Uncommon.
SCHEU-RIESZ, Helene. Gretchen Discovers America: A Story of Pre-War Types in After-War Lives. London: Dent. 1936. 8vo. First edition. Publisher’s burgundy cloth lettered in yellow to spine and upper board with pictorial city skyline, in the excellent and colourful dust jacket designed by Dorothea Braby. An excellent file copy with file stamp and reference to front endpaper, half-title, title page and final endpapers hole-punched ‘file copy’. The cloth clean, bright and sharp, the binding tight and square, the contents fine otherwise. The dust jacket priced 6s net to front flap, some fading to the spine panel and a couple of small closed tears to extremities, but a sharp example overall.
An early novel by the Austrian author and publisher, which certainly mirrors her own life. At the time of publication, Scheu-Riesz was a popular figure among Austrian and indeed European women’s suffrage, publishing affordable children’s fiction and travelling to England often to collect children’s stories deemed worthy of translation in her homeland. Simultaneously, she was a revered pacifist, representing her country at the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Yet the Nazis were a growing, seemingly uncontrollable concern, and as a Jewish female publisher, she took the wise option to emigrate to the US in 1937, after having visited a year or so earlier. Her protagonist, Gretchen, chooses a similar fate. The dust jacket designer, Dorothea Braby, produced relatively few jackets in this period and is better remembered for her work for the Golden Cockerel Press. Uncommon.
