Home Again / The Flight of the Shadow

This cloth-bound volume binds two novels by Scottish author George MacDonald under a single cover decorated in the Arts and Crafts manner: an intricate block-print panel of stylized vines, leaves, and berries frames the gilt-lettered titles on a dark ground. The design owes more to William Morris than to the wood-pulp tradition — this is a late-Victorian gift-book object, not a dime-magazine. Yet MacDonald's fiction, with its Gothic undertow, dream logic, and supernatural shadow imagery, fed directly into the weird and fantasy literature that pulp editors would later package under lurid painted covers. The author's name appears in gilt at the foot; a Library of Congress accession label bisects the lower half.