LEETCH, Dorothy Lyman; MORA, Jo (illustrator).
Benito and Loreta Delfin: Children of Alta California.
FIRST EDITION. Boston: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co., 1932.
Small octavo. 267 pp. Illustrated by Jo Mora with a frontispiece and twenty-one line drawings. In the original pictorial dust jacket, which repeats Mora's front-cover design. A fine copy in a very good plus dust jacket, with darkening to the spine and edges, wear to the extremities, a short closed tear and creasing to the upper rear edge, and damp staining along the flap edges.
A children's novel of Spanish California — the story of a boy and a girl growing up in the mission-era world of the padres, the presidios, and the great ranchos — written by Dorothy Lyman Leetch. What lifts the book for the collector is the illustrator: Jo Mora, the sculptor, cartographer, and "Renaissance Man of the West," who produced its frontispiece and twenty-one line drawings in 1932 — the same Monterey Peninsula years in which he was making his most sought-after pictorial maps.
Benito and Loreta Delfin belongs to the Mora-illustrated canon alongside Dawn and the Dons: The Romance of Monterey (1926) and Fifty Funny Animal Tales (1932), and is one of the more accessible titles for a collector building a Mora shelf. The book is genuinely uncommon in its pictorial dust jacket, and copies offered without the jacket sell for a fraction of the jacketed price; the jacket is the principal scarcity factor.
SKU TO-2026-081
