Publishers’ Binding Thursday
This week’s Publishers’ Binding Thursday post comes on the heels of last week’s post, which was translated by the author of this week’s book, Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904). Hearn is an interesting figure—born on the Greek island Lefkada, his family moved to Dublin where he was abandoned first by his mother and then by his father, left to live with his great aunt. He ended up penniless in London as a teenager, until he was given a one-way ticket to New York by his now-infirm guardian’s financial manager, Henry Molyneux, and told to find Molyneux’s relatives in Cincinnati. Those relatives gave Hearn $5 and sent him on his way and he ended up working for a printer and writing sensational stories for the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer. He later moved on to New Orleans, where he continued writing for newspapers and began translation and other writing work. Harper’s sent him to the West Indies for two years, and later Hearn traveled to Japan on commission to write a story (that never materialized) and never left. He married into a Japanese family, who eventually adopted him so that he could become a Japanese citizen, taking the name Koizumi Yakumo. To learn more about Hearn, there is a nice piece from the New Yorker that goes into more detail about him and this work, as well as a piece in the Paris Review.
His time in Japan is the origin of this book, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, published by Houghton, Mifflin, and Co. in 1905. The book was designed by Bruce Rogers. Hearn wrote these Japanese ghost stories from traditional tales he may have heard from his wife, Koizumi Setsuko. From the New Yorker:
“Our primal fear when it comes to ghosts, Hearn wrote, is not of seeing or hearing them but of being touched by them; the kaidan both exploit that revulsion and offer the heroic spectacle of characters whose passions enable them to overcome it. A mother dies during a cholera epidemic, yet her love for her infant son is so powerful that she continues to nurse him for three years after her death—an outcome, as in many of the tales, somehow both sentimental and horrifying.”
Hearn is well remembered in Japan, where there are museums named for him in the places he lived, and in Ireland there are the Lafcadio Hearn Japanese Gardens in Tramore, where his father was from.
Keep an eye out here for another version of this text tomorrow for Fine Press Friday!
View more Publishers’ Binding Thursday posts.
View more books designed by Bruce Rogers.
– Alice, Special Collections Department Manager
