PREVIEW: Covers and introduction authors for the new Furrowed Middlebrow titles, coming in January 2019

I posted last month about the long-awaited new batch of Furrowed Middlebrow books from Dean Street Press, set to be released in January. I was busting to tell you more at that point, and now I finally can. Yay!

First, the new books will, like their predecessors, contain newly-commissioned introductions, and I'm excited to announce who will be writing them. 

For the Elizabeth Eliot books, I'm very happy to say that scholar and researcher Elizabeth Crawford will once more be taking the reins. Elizabeth previously wrote wonderful intros for our editions of Rachel Ferguson, Winifred Peck, and Elizabeth Fair, and I can't wait to see what new information she is able to unearth about the elusive Eliot, about whom very few details are available. She's a somewhat mysterious figure at this point, but if anyone can shed light on her, Elizabeth will! Thank you to Elizabeth for her willingness to do the honors again.

And for the D. E. Stevenson titles, most of you will immediately recognize our illustrious intro writer. I still can't quite believe it, but worldwide bestselling author (more than 40 million books sold in 46 languages according to his Wikipedia page!) Alexander McCall Smith will be doing the honors for DES. For those who have been living under a rock, McCall Smith is the author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, as well as numerous other titles for both adults and children. Check out his website here. I'm very much looking forward to reading his intro!

But now, on to the covers!

First off, as an aficionado of classic dustjacket covers, which you know I am, I'm particularly excited that all three of our Mrs Tim titles, by the inimitable D. E. Stevenson, will make use of cover art from earlier editions of the books. (Thus, you actually had a sort of preview of our new covers in my previous post without knowing it!)

I think Dean Street Press did a beautiful job with all three of these, don't you? And a renewed thanks to Jerri Chase, whose scans of covers of her copies of these books provided us with the images in the first place!

Then we have the two additional D. E. Stevenson titles, with wonderfully evocative images that feel like they should have been used on previous editions:

Those are both from vintage travel posters of Scotland, and I'd happily walk right into either image if I could.

For our Elizabeth Eliot titles, we drew from more disparate sources.

When I was searching for cover images for some of the titles from our last batch of books, I came across several breathtaking portraits by Rex Whistler of Lady Caroline Paget. They didn't work for any of the titles I was working on at the time, but I remembered them when I was looking for something appropriate for Eliot's novels. And thus we got our rather gorgeous cover of Alice—elegant, melancholy, and yet somehow playful (look at that dog!).

I love our other Eliot covers too, which include a striking interior by Francis Cadell and two lovely period illustrations that Rupert at Dean Street Press discovered:

The ambivalence between the two women in that last image simply oozes off the page—as it should for the cover of a novel focused largely on the fascinatingly ambivalent relationship between two women.

So what do you think? Did we do these books justice? I hope you like the covers as much as I do!