CARLI Digital Collections Featured Image: Orchids on the calabash tree

The illustration on this dust jacket (signed “Eisner” in the lower right corner) depicts a woman standing in front of a palm tree, carrying a basket on her head, set against a distant tropical landscape of mountains, ocean, and sandy beaches.

The jacket served as a cover for the revised edition of George Teeple Eggleston’s book, published by Frederick Muller in 1970, describing the author’s experiences on the island of St. Lucia in the West Indies. Eggleston (1906-1990) was a former New York-based editor of Life, Scribner’s Commentator, and Reader’s Digest. He was also a yachtsman who, with his wife Hazel, moved to St. Lucia in 1957; the Egglestons spent 22 years there before relocating to Sarasota, Florida. The back of the jacket features blurbs from reviews in the Sunday Telegraph, New York Times, Newsday, and other publications.

This book belongs to a collection of 1,000 volumes on Caribbean literature, history, and politics acquired from the 1940s through the 1990s by Jamaican nationalist poet and Supreme Court Justice H.D. Carberry. The digital collection, which currently contains 49 images of dust jackets along with front and back flaps, is an effort to preserve some 600 fragile book jackets in the Carberry Collection.

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