Dustjackets vs. coronavirus: Mabel Esther Allan edition

In keeping with my firm (if, technically, unproven) belief that luscious cover art strengthens our immune systems against coronavirus, here's an enormous and breathtaking batch of covers (courtesy, as usual, of my Fairy Godmother) of Mabel Esther Allan titles.

Now, if you're looking for an author who can help you forget all about sheltering in place, or if you need to lift your chin off the floor from thoughts of canceled outings and vacations (as ours this fall, to Spain and Portugal no less, is likely to be), then you could do much worse than turning to Mabel Esther Allan. With her fascination for travel and her ability to evoke a sense of place, not to mention making the history of a locale come alive, I'm finding her a perfect companion for these strange times.

And her dustjackets alone are a veritable European tour. I shared some others here, and intended to proceed to share these too, but alas I got distracted... Enjoy them now! (Click to open them full size.)

This one is coming soon from Girls Gone By
(complete with wraparound cover!)

Dustjackets vs. coronavirus: Grownup fiction edition

As the news continues to take us on a rollercoaster ride and isolation makes us restless and discontented, I thought, "What could be a more powerful antidote to the coronavirus than some lovely dustjackets?" Okay, full disclosure, the medical efficacy of luscious dustjackets is uncertain (it's never actually been proven to be unefficacious, however!), but at any rate...

I intended to do more of these posts months ago, including some of the many dustjacket scans provided by my Fairy Godmother from her vast, envy-inducing collection, but I never got round to it. Happily, there's time to do it now. 

This time around are some random covers for novels for adults. These are for books or authors that just happened to come up in emails with FG or that I had mentioned on my blog. You should be able to click on each one in order to view it at full size. Hope you enjoy perusing as much as I have!

Ruth Adam is an old favorite (and hopefully soon a new reprint...)
and this is one of her rarest titles

I've also written often about Kitty Barne, another favorite

This might look like not my (or FG's) cup of tea, but based on
mentions of it it might actually be quite entertaining

One of several titles I came across in my quest for WWII titles

Rachel Ferguson is an all-time favorite and this is her only novel
to cover the WWII years, in a seaside resort no less

Mary K. Harris is well-known for her school stories, including
Gretel at St Bride's, which features a girl refugee from the Nazis, but
she's less known for her three more grownup titles, shown here

Sometimes I'm mortified at my reading habits. Having reviewed Hassett's
Sallypark and Educating Elizabeth years ago, and having had this sequel
to the latter on my shelf for nearly as long, I still haven't read it...

Hilda Hewett is a slightly newer favorite, and here are three of her
books I haven't yet read. With any luck, you'll see jackets for a couple
more of her books soon, currently winging their way to me from England!

Another intriguing book I investigated for our WWII batch of FM titles

And I learned, thanks to FG, that this one has little or nothing to do with WWII

Two really lovely jackets from a favorite of many of you as well as
of me. I have both of these, but of course I haven't read them...

FG sent this jacket and the next one along after I'd written about
another adult novel by Barbara Willard, author of the Mantlemass
historical fiction series for children

And finally, just because it's so beautiful, the jacket of Enid Bagnold's
final novel, which I read years ago and remember liking (but nothing
else about it)

There, now don't you feel better?

Dustjacket porn: Familiar children's titles

Any excuse is a good one to share beautiful or interesting dustjacket images. This post focuses on books I've already read and/or reviewed here. Of course, all the images are courtesy of my Fairy Godmother. (If you click on the images, you should be able to see them in their larger form.)

One of the rarest titles here is LORNA LEWIS's Tea and Hot Bombs, which I did write about here in 2017. This was one of the many books Grant Hurlock has shared with me in the past few years, a fun and wonderfully detailed Blitz story from a young girl's perspective.

ELFRIDA VIPONT's books aren't so terribly rare, but their original dustjackets are hard to come by. I've only mentioned in passing, I think, what a fan I am.

The Lark in the Morn and The Lark on the Wing were, as many of you know, followed by The Spring of the Year, Flowering Spring, and The Pavilion in Vipont's series about the Haverard family. The three later books were reprinted by Girls Gone By, so their original covers are at least familiar thanks to those.

Then there's Vipont's lesser-known trio of books about the Conyers family and their home, Dowbiggins. They're not as polished as the Haverard series, but I still found them entertaining, and I love getting to see the original covers. I had the U.S. edition of the third book, retitled A Win for Henry Conyers

I have the Girls Gone By reprint of DORITA FAIRLIE BRUCE's The Debatable Mound, which I reviewed with her other Colmskirk novels here and which, on its own, I made part of that year's Furrowed Middlebrow Dozen. But the original dustjacket is still lovely to see.

I reviewed KITTY BARNE's Family Footlights last year (see here), and enjoyed it very much, but I didn't have any example of the cover art at all. Voila!

I mentioned having acquired MOLLIE CHAPPELL's The Sugar and Spice, along with a zillion other books, here (yikes, book shopping posts are a bit demoralizing to look back on!), but I never got round to reporting on it. It's a lovely little book, and perfect if you, like me, have a strange fixation on stories of girls or young women starting or operating a business.

In 2017 I mentioned here very much enjoying DOROTHY SMITH's Those Greylands Girls and I commented about the rather lovely illustrations, but I didn't have the quite eye-catching dustjacket at that point.

And finally, I would have sworn I had mentioned NANCY BREARY's charming, funny school story It Was Fun in the Fourth here somewhere, but if I did the blog's search function is failing me. It's great fun, though, and it's lovely to have a better dustjacket image for it.

Thanks as always to F.G. for her generosity in providing these lovely images!