An illustrated introduction to Sweden for English readers, 1927

Sweden came out in 1927 from A. & C. Black in London, one of the many illustrated books of the time that brought a European country to readers at home. It belongs to the interwar trade in such books, which leaned on their pictures as heavily as on their words. Dudley Heathcote wrote the text and A. Heaton Cooper painted the scenes, reproduced here as colour plates.

The two halves work together. Heathcote describes the country and its people as he found them, while Cooper’s plates show the scenery he is writing about, so the reader travels by eye as well as by prose. Read now, it shows how Sweden was introduced to English-speaking readers in the 1920s, plainly and in colour.

This copy is a first edition in the publisher’s embossed blue cloth, lettered in gilt on the spine. The spine has faded, its ends and the corners are rubbed, and foxing runs through the pages, heaviest on the advertising leaf at the front. A. & C. Black’s own promotional leaflets are still laid in. Translucent tabs along the front hinge may mark an old repair, which has not been examined. There is no dust jacket, and the colour plates have not been counted.