The first edition of Janet Frame’s first collection of short stories, The lagoon & other stories, is quarter bound in cloth with a dust jacket designed by Denis Glover (1912-1980). Glover founded The Caxton Press in 1936 and was instrumental in improving typographic and print quality in New Zealand publishing and his book covers are firmly grounded in typographical tradition.
The Caxton Press published the second edition of The lagoon in 1961, by which time Glover had departed the firm. The jacket design of the second edition is by Leo Bensemann.
Janet Frame. The lagoon and other stories. 2nd ed. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1961.
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Janet Frame’s first novel Owl’s Do Cry was published to general acclaim in 1957, although it was perceived as somewhat negative and personal in her childhood home of Oamaru. The inner blurb of the dust jacket asserts rather prophetically “the publishers believe that Owls Do Cry will prove an outstanding literary event.”
The jacket design by Dennis Beytagh is a fine example of his expressive typography and skilled use of colour to convey a book’s themes – in Hamish Thomspon’s words, the title “hovers, ghostly and anxious, over a city at night”.
--Hamish Thompson. Coverup: the art of the book cover in New Zealand. Auckland: Godwit, 2007.
