Paull's dust jacket is for one of Hugh MacLennan's lesser known works, The Precipice, published by Collins Canada in 1948. The cover is described in a Quill & Quire (November 1948, p. 17) story on Canadian dust jacket design as presenting "the contrasts between the warm if simple and humdrum life of the small Canadian town, and the bleak, skyscraper existence of the great American city." Never reprinted as a White Circle paperback, The Precipice can't have been as successful as Two Solitudes and Barometer Rising. The art is unattributed in the book.
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I think you're spot on in writing that "The Precipice can't have been as successful as Two Solitudes and Barometer Rising." In Hugh MacLennan: A Writer's Life biographer Elspeth Cameron writes that the novel's first period sales figure was 11,000, where as that for Two Solitudes had been 42,000.
ReplyDeleteAn aside: I've found the dust jacket for The Precipice to be particularly fragile.
Thanks for the numbers to support my guess about the book. Interesting to note that nonetheless it won the Governor General's award. And at that level of sales was likely a best seller relative to most Canadian novels of the era.
ReplyDeleteMy copy's DJ is in pretty good shape. Bought the book locally(Halifax)last year.