This luxurious Easton Press edition of Green Mansions marries W.H. Hudson’s 1904 ecological fable with the striking modernist illustrations of Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, creating a harmonious dialogue between text and image. Bound in sumptuous full leather with 22k gold accents and moiré silk endpapers, the volume elevates Hudson’s haunting tale of doomed romance in the South American rain forest into an objet d’art.
Covarrubias’s illustrations—ranging from delicate ink drawings to vibrant full-color plates—capture the primal beauty of Hudson’s jungle paradise and its mystical inhabitant, Rima, the bird-girl. His stylized depictions of tropical flora and indigenous figures reflect both his anthropological precision and avant-garde sensibility, perfectly complementing Hudson’s lyrical prose about a vanishing Eden. The edition includes scholarly commentary contextualizing the novel’s pioneering environmental themes and Covarrubias’s cross-cultural artistic vision.
A masterpiece of early 20th-century book production, this Easton Press release preserves the novel’s melancholic magic while showcasing Covarrubias’s underappreciated brilliance as an illustrator. Together, they transform Green Mansions into a tactile experience—where the scent of leather, the gleam of gilt, and the rhythm of Hudson’s words conspire to immerse readers in a lost world of wonder.
