The Paper Cap: A Story of Love and Labor

New York/London: D. Appleton and Company. Good. 1918. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [a good sound copy, dust-soiling and age-darkening to edges of text block, bumping and slght exposure of boards at all tips, one-time owner's pencil signature on front endpaper (color frontispiece) A very late-in-life novel by this prolific British-born novelist and teacher -- her last, in fact, completed (according to her NYT obituary) in June 1918, the month before she suffered a serious heat stroke from which she never recovered. (She died in March 1919 at age 87.) The author of sixty-some novels, she endured a lot of tragedy in her early life -- including losing her husband and three sons in the yellow fever epidemic that hit Galveston, Texas, in 1867 -- and only took up writing around age 40, after she and her surviving three daughters moved to New York following that episode. Per a contemporary newspaper blurb, this novel is "a story of labor conditions in England in the days when the class struggle and the industrial revolution were beginning, when workmen really wore the paper cap that has since become the symbol of their calling." (The book's preface, entitled "In Advance," goes into some detail on the significance and symbolism of the paper cap.) A note about the frontispiece illustration: on the title page it's credited to Stockton Mulford, but the illustration itself is clearly signed by Walt Louderback. I have no explanation for this anomaly. .