Some photos of the 1907 copy of The Princess and the Ploughman by Florence Morse Kingsley that I am reading from, which I inherited from my grandma. I’ve read excerpts here and there since inheriting it, but never the novel in its entirety. I’ll be reading it from start to finish for the first time for The Side B Anthology.
Left: The front cover of The Princess and the Ploughman, which has been bound in green fabric, with a faded, embossed illustration of a tree on it. There may once have been a woman sitting under the tree, but the cover is so weather-worn that if that were the case, it has faded entirely. The title and name of the author are embellished with gold leaf that has lost most of its shine.
Right: Close up of the underside of the book where parts of the fabric covering the spine have worn away entirely, or where the green colour has been rubbed off. The page edges are brown with age and speckled with sea salt.
Left: My fingertips hold open the front cover, which has almost detached from the spine. The page is browned and stained with age. In the top right corner is a message in cursive written in pencil: Letitia Feener from Allan Stevenson. My grandma may have known who these people were, or may have gotten this book secondhand long before I was born; I don’t know who they are, though.
Right: The title page inside the book is decorated with two thin trees growing up from the bottom of the page, their branches interweaving in the centre to underline the title and overline the author’s name.
Left: A page of the novel showing the flower motif underneath the title at the top of the page which has been coloured in with what appears to be crayon. The first flower is violet and the rest of the flowers are golden yellow. The other pages whose flowers had been coloured in had all been done in golden yellow.
Right: Close up of the bottom left corner of the book cover, where pressure from holding open a windowpane had caused a small visible indent in the cover. Surprising, how well the book held up.
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