A Look Inside: The Romance of Pilgrims

(Copyrighted Materials)
New for the Longfellow Bicentennial of 2007!

A LOOK INSIDE:
The Romance of Pilgrims: A Great American Love-Story, by Henry Longfellow, adapted by David Bradford (Boston Hill Press, 275 pages, $22.95, ISBN 0-9787992-0-8).

An Illustrated Legend Revives an American Tradition

In time for the Longfellow Bicentennial, The Romance of Pilgrims is the first modern adaptation of a work by Henry Longfellow in many generations. Its updated, modern free-verse is exceptionally easy-to-read, and interwoven with hundreds of historic portraits, engravings, and colonial-era designs.

This is an illustrated legend, harkening to our own multi-media era, while still being true to the lost world of the Pilgrims. Scene by scene, we experience life as it was, with the mythic Pilgrims stepping off the pages into our imaginations.

However, The Romance of Pilgrims is also distinctly traditional, too. It revives a longstanding genre, in which legends and folk-tales were set to verse, and presented in modest pocketbooks; they were the precursors of the blockbuster bestsellers of today.

Tradition

Hence, The Romance of Pilgrims contains no modern, commercial photographs of art. Portraits and landscape paintings are adapted from old prints published before 1923 or from government archives.

Some images derive from glass negatives a century old; they reproduce portraits nearly four-hundred years old. Most have been digitally repainted to correct defects due to age, and to conform to the modernized text. Some revised images are composites of several historical individuals or landscapes.

All final images are designed for presentation in black-and-white. They recreate a by-gone age when monochrome produced vivid colors of the imagination.

Shakespearean

The Romance of Pilgrims is further divided into separate acts, like that of a Shakespearean play. Each act is preceded by a scene-setting synopsis.The text is set in large type and short lines, matching the spoken cadences. The tone is that of a breathless epic, echoing classical tales of the ancient world.


Regrettably, no portraits of the Pilgrim lovers survive. Instead, contemporary portraits of Dutch citizens, painted by Rembrandt (1606-1669) and other famed artists, serve as stand-ins for the Pilgrims.

This substitution is based on historical fact: The Mayflower Pilgrims admired the reform-minded Dutch; lived for a decade in Rembrandt's Holland; and departed for America wearing the latest Dutch fashions.

Portraits were selected from over a thousand men and women of the era. They express a romantic ideal that remains as heart-felt in our time as in theirs.

Available through BarnesandNoble.com, Amazon.com, and bookstores by request. Ask your neighborhood bookseller to search the catalogs of the wholesalers, Ingram and Baker & Taylor. See also the Book Review in this blog.

To Buy at Barnes & Noble, click below--http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9780978799205&itm=2&z=y

To Buy at Amazon.com, click below--http://www.amazon.com/Romance-Pilgrims-Great-American-Love-Story/dp/0978799208/sr=1-1/qid=1163380264/ref=sr_1_1/104-1970510-4386329?ie=UTF8&s=books