Rockwell Kent's THE JEWEL: A ROMANCE OF FAIRYLAND

Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) worked in many areas as an artist, and is probably best-remembered as a painter and illustrator. Among the many books he illustrated were Beowulf (1932), translated by William Ellery Leonard; The Canterbury Tales (1934), in modern English by J.U. Nicolson; and The Saga of Gisli (1936), translated by Ralph Allen.  Oddly, the one item by which I remember Kent best is the colophon for a publishing firm founded in 1925 by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S, Oppenheimer, who had planned to call their new firm Half Moon Press, using explorer Henry Hudson's ship (the Halve Maen, i.e., the Half Moon) as the symbol.  But Kent's design was of a Viking ship, and thus the Viking Press was born. 

Ten years after Kent's death it was discovered that he had written and illustrated a small book, The Jewel: A Romance of Fairyland, for an extramarital lover. The story was finally published in 1990 in a slip-cased form (limited to 500 copies) by The Baxter Society of Portland, Maine. The Kent facsimile story is in hardcover, and a Companion Booklet to the Facsimile Edition, edited by Eliot H. Stanley, accompanied it in trade paperback. I kept a review of the book for decades before I finally acquired a copy at a moderate  price.  

Kent's tale is reproduced in his own handwriting, with half a dozen small illustrations throughout the thirteen page story. It was presented as a book to Hildegarde Hirsch on 6 November 1917. The story tells of a prince who in youth had questioned God and was thereafter doomed to be alone until he might find love in the heart of a woman. Much later, in a far land, he meets a beautiful young girl. He shows her a crystal globe in which she can see the lovely land from which he came. They plan to move there, and as they save up, they watch a tiny house growing within the globe. But the maiden has doubts, and wants to use their savings to buy a jewel. After the crystal globe is shattered, the wreckage becomes a jewel. The maiden looks radiant wearing the jewel, and becomes self-absorbed. The prince's madness returns to him. The jewel is thus named Broken Faith. The means for undoing the effects of the jewel, we are told, will come in another tale. 

But there was no further tale, and the affair soon ended, as the tale had foreshadowed, leaving a wistful melancholy for the reader, as well as a sadness that Kent wrote no other fiction.