Book bindings exhibition: Mason, Edwards, Stockton, et al.

The online "Beauty for Commerce" exhibition at the University of Rochester features some beautiful book cover and spine designs from the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Some examples include:

• Amelia B. Edwards, Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys (1890). Bestselling novelist and explorer Edwards was one of the inspirations for Elizabeth Peters's Amelia Peabody Emerson.

• A. E. W. Mason and Andrew Lang, Parson Kelly (1899). Liberal Member of Parliament Mason is well remembered for the novels The Four Feathers (1902) and Fire Over England (1936), but he also created Inspector Hanaud (At the Villa Rose, etc.). Writer-critic Lang is best known for his various volumes of fairy tales.

• Frank R. Stockton, Afield and Afloat (1900) and Mrs. Clift's Yacht (1896). Stockton is probably best known for the short story "The Lady or the Tiger?" (1882).

About the image: Amelia B. Edwards, NYPL

Happy birthday, Andrew Lang.

The waspish novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and critic Andrew Lang, best known for editing various volumes of fairy tales (The Blue Fairy Book, etc.), was born today in Selkirk, Scotland, in 1844. His prodigious literary activities include angering his countrymen in Pickle the Spy (1897) when he proved that a Scottish nobleman once spied for the British (gasp!); cowriting The World's Desire (1890) with
H. Rider Haggard, which imagines Odysseus's last voyage; and penning the "shilling shocker" The Mark of Cain (1886), which features, according to The Westminster Review, "one out-and-out villain, who had himself elaborately tattooed for felonious purposes" (590). For some of Lang's critical essays, see his Adventures among Books (1905) and Letters to Dead Authors (1886); another interesting work is The Valet's Tragedy (1903), where Lang discusses historical mysteries such as the Man in the Iron Mask. An overview of his work is provided in "Two Scotsmen of Letters" by Brander Matthews in Aspects of Fiction and Other Ventures in Criticism (1902).