Salamina, by Rockwell Kent, in two editions

Salamina (1935), also known as Rockwell Kent’s Greenland Book. Same book, two editions within just two years, just a different dust wrapper – a testament to its popularity.

The below excerpts, from my foreword for the Wesleyan University Press edition (2003) of this book, provide a bit more clarity to the publication and the two different wrappers. And, my foreword also offers an opinion about Kent’s tale by Marie Ahnighito Peary, daughter of the North Pole explorer Robert Peary.

“The October publications were wrapped in a dust jacket that displayed a tantalizing portrait of our Greenland heroine — Salamina — bathing in an icy fjord. Kent, an irredeemable humorist, and no bluenose himself, undoubtedly intended to titillate the reader. Another edition followed within two years. This subsequent printing was cloaked in a jacket that portrays an eagle, defiantly poised, as if to safeguard Kent’s Greenland paradise against a world rapidly turning on it’s head.”

“Marie Ahnighito Peary, daughter of the North Pole explorer Robert Peary, and a birth child of Greenland, commented on her enjoyment of the story in a critique she wrote for The Saturday Review. She approved of Kent’s observations of the native peoples and the terrain they inhabited. Furthermore, unlike some of the haughty desk side reviewers of the time who considered Kent’s writing ‘loquacious,’ Peary appreciated his ‘chatty and familiar style which has the advantage of presenting places and people in an unforgettably vivid manner.’ She recognized that Kent was an artist first, and that his viewpoint of this one group of Eskimos was as legitimate as any other’s. Peary considered Kent’s ‘word pictures’ and illustrations a ‘revelation to all those who think of Greenland as a desolate, unimpressive island, peopled with uncouth savages.’ As she well knew the beauty and grandeur of the land were always present, but it took Kent to capture that majesty, to bring it all back home for the ‘less adventurous spirits to see and enjoy.’”

Salamina, signed on endpaper. $225. Rockwell Kent’s Greenland Book. $125.