JACKSON, Helen Hunt; SANDHAM, Henry (illustrator).
Ramona: A Story.
MONTEREY EDITION, complete in two volumes — the first illustrated edition of the novel. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1900.
References: BAL 10456; Zamorano 80 #46; Baird & Greenwood 1296; Powell, California Classics #23. Octavo. xxxv, 310; [vi], 308 pp. Twenty-four full-page halftone plates by Henry Sandham, each with its printed titled tissue guard, together with his decorative chapter headings. Introduction by Susan Coolidge. Bound in the publisher's ribbed blue cloth, top edges gilt, and dark coated endpapers. Books and dust jackets are in fine condition with a hint of wear; some wear and fading to slipcase.
Ramona is the foundation document of the romantic Southern California imagination. It is the story of a Scottish–Native American orphan, the Moreno hacienda, and the dispossession of mission-era California. Helen Hunt Jackson died in 1885, the year after the novel appeared; it has remained continuously in print for more than a century. Lawrence Clark Powell called it "the first novel about Southern California… the best California book of its kind."
The 1900 Monterey Edition is the first illustrated edition — the form Jackson did not live to see. The illustrations are by Henry Sandham (1842–1910), the Montreal-born painter who had traveled with Jackson through Southern California in the early 1880s and made field drawings for her Century Magazine articles. The Art Nouveau floral cover design is by Amy Sacker (1872–1965), the Boston Arts and Crafts designer, signed with her monogram; her Ramona binding is now studied as a piece of turn-of-the-century book design in its own right.
SKU TO-2026-080
