I’ve had this book for a few years and I cannot find any trace of it online. It’s called “The Trail: A collection of poems on the out-of-doors” by J. A. Hart 1932. It looks kind of homemade but also very professional. It’s printed like a book and has glossy pages with pictures of nature and poetic quotes under neath. The cover is thicker than a paper back but definitely not a hard back. It’s almost a cross between cardboard and leather? The cover is an engraved drawing of trees, hills, and the moon with “The Trail” on the bottom and it’s all traced with silver paint. All the poems are credited to their authors but the photos have no locations or dates and I cannot find any information whatsoever. Even if it is just some self published book or homemade collection I’d love to find out any information possible!
Steal it, publish it, boom Disney move.
This sounds like a line in the Phineas and Ferb theme song
Now to give a monkey a shower.
Poetry books can sometime be printed in extremely small numbers, by local printers, with basically no trappings of regular publishers. Think “local poet ran off fifty copies of their slim volume, and sold them for fifty cents from the counter of their country store.” I’ve encountered some before, although this looks much nicer. It was definitely possible to get a local print shop to do this sort of thing; now there are websites that handle it.
This is more or less what House of Leaves is about. Have fun with all that!
Also shades of Station Eleven kinda
I’m not finding anything online either, but you might post this over in r/rarebooks. It’s absolutely a privately printed chapbook, which is very common for poetry books even now. That material for the cover is also pretty common for chapbooks. It’s hard to find because it would have been printed in very small numbers. Someone else commented on a J. A. Hurt that died in the late 30s, that would be a very good lead to follow up.
It may be a book of poems in the Cowboy tradition. It was probably privately produced.
This tradition also has a general art style. I love these works. You’re really lucky!
To learn more: https://discoverpoetry.com/poems/cowboy-poems/
Cowboy poetry? I guess this is what comedian Andy Daly is making fun of with his Dalton Wilcox character.
I actually met a cowboy poet once and realized that Dalton Wilcox was a very restrained and buttoned-down homage to the genre by comparison.
This sounds so cool. Will you post some pictures?