Description
Grail Publications, Published 1952. Hardcover, 75 pp.; 22 cm; illustrated with black-and-white drawings by Paul A. Grout.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
112
Turn the pages with the arrows, keyboard, or a swipe.
Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Very Good condition with a Good dust jacket. Green cloth boards, gilt lettering on spine. Mild shelf and edge wear. Binding tight. Pages mildly toned, otherwise unmarked. Illustrated dust jacket, a black-robed figure in red and black brushwork against pale green. A few nicks and tears of an inch or less, creasing along edges, and a 1.5 inch cut removed from the front flap where the price would have appeared, taking no printed text. Mild to moderate toning to edges and spine, mild soiling. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. Juvenile biography of Pierre-Jean De Smet (1801-1873), the Flemish Jesuit who reached America in 1821 and became the best known missionary to the Plains and Rocky Mountain tribes, following him from a boyhood in Termonde through the Potawatomi mission, capture by the Blackfeet, and the Fort Laramie treaty negotiations. Grail Publications was the book imprint of St. Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana, whose Abbey Press had published The Grail magazine since 1919. Paul A. Grout was its house illustrator, best known for Mary Fabyan Windeatt's saints' lives, several later reprinted. His drawings here are unusually bold for a 1950s juvenile: heavy black brush and scratchboard with hard silhouettes, the scalp dance plate close to abstraction. Text and illustrations carry the racial language and attitudes of 1952, including terms for Native peoples now considered offensive.