Nana's Mother

One of the pleasures of mid-century mass market paperbacks is comparing them with current editions. Title renaming, abridgements and cover art are all points of change. Here's a good example. 

Nana's Mother was published by Avon Books in 1950. The title is, unusually, not an Avon creation. It is seen on the title page of the first American edition (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1879). But the cover is most definitely an Avon - a 1940s Hollywood version of mid nineteenth century France.

L'Assommoir is the seventh in Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle of twenty novels, published in 1877. The Oxford edition is approximately 2 1/4 times longer than the Avon. 

Oxford - 2009

Oxford back

Avon 271 - 1950

Avon 271 back