The Jewel in the Lotus by Allen Edwardes (Bantam)
Q: How many swash caps can you use on one book cover?
The 1970s: Yes!
Recherche was designed by Julius Herriet, Sr. for the Johnson type foundry in Philadelphia. Herriet is one of several American type designers who emigrated from Germany in the 19th century – others include Gustave F. Schroeder, Charles E. Heyer, and Herman Ihlenburg. Herriet was born in 1818 in Braunschweig and started creating type for Johnson in the 1850s. His son, Julius Herriet, Jr., was born in 1861 in New York and took the same profession. I haven’t found a date for Recherche, but it must have been made before 1867, when Johnson was superseded by MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan.
Like many designs from the Victorian era, Recherche was revived in the late 1960s. Phototype adaptations are shown by Photo-Lettering in 1971 and VGC in 1972. One of these versions is used on this paperback issued by Bantam in 1976, with cover art by Leo & Diane Dillon.
The Jewel in the Lotus is a compilation of orientalist erotica named after a famous mantra, written by Allen Edwardes and first published in 1959. Advertised on the cover as “the masterpiece that reveals the sexual culture of the East”, the Wikipedia article decribes it as a rather dubious work:
[…] an amassment of sexual curiosities apparently plucked from a variety of ethnographical and orientalist sources. Throughout the book, one finds a plethora of uncontrolled generalizations concerning the sexual behaviour of non-western populations. Doubt has been cast on the sincerity of its scholarship. A recent study accuses the author of “more than a touch of prurience,” and warns that “the guise of orientalist scholarship clearly gives Edwardes leeway to express a surfeit of subconscious homoerotic phantasy.” As such, the book is a curious and highly specific example of a more general tendency in Western scholarship—or, in this case, rather pseudo-scholarship—which has been criticized as ‘Orientalism’ (Edward Said).
