Marse Chan - Meh Lady - Unc' Edinburg - group of 3 matched Thomas Nelson Page books

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Group of three matched Thomas Nelson Page books: Marse Chan (1900); Meh Lady (1901); Unc' Edinburg (1897).

Book design by Margaret Neilson Armstrong: dark blue cloth-covered boards with pale green Art Nouveau flower design; each title is featured on a silver scroll design across the front. Book titles and author's name in gilt on spines.

Each book is inscribed to Lucy Woodford Buckner dated December, 1901. Otherwise, books are clean and unmarked, with square, tight bindings. Frontispiece tissue guards are all intact and in place. Very light wear to corners of covers and spine extremities.

Marse Chan, A Tale of Old Virginia, is illustrated by W. T. Smedley.

Meh Lady, A Story of the War, is illustrated by C. S. Reinhart.

Unc' Edinburg, A Plantation Echo, is illustrated by B. West Clinedinst.

Thomas Nelson Page (1853 - 1922) popularized the plantation tradition genre of Southern writing, which told of an idealized version of life before the Civil War, with contented slaves working for beloved masters and their families. His 1887 collection of short stories, In Ole Virginia, is the quintessential work of that genre. Another short-story collection of his is entitled The Burial of the Guns (1894). He was born at Oakland, one of the Nelson family plantations, in Hanover County, Virginia. He was a scion of the prominent Nelson and Page families, each First Families of Virginia. Although he was from once-wealthy lineage, after the American Civil War, which began when he was only 8 years old, his parents and their relatives were largely impoverished during Reconstruction and his teenage years.

Margaret Neilson Armstrong (1867 - 1944) was a 19th and early 20th-century American book cover designer, illustrator, and author. She is best known for her book covers influenced by Art Nouveau. She also wrote and illustrated the first comprehensive guide to wildflowers of the American west, Field Book of Western Wild Flowers (1915). In later life, she wrote two popular biographies and three mystery novels.

W. T. Smedley (1858 - 1920) was one of the most popular American illustrators of the nineteenth century. He studied with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In the early 1880s, Smedley moved to New York, where his illustrations began appearing in popular magazines. He went to Australia in the mid-1880s to work on a commission for Scribner'sMagazine, and took advantage of his time abroad to travel to India and work in Paris for a time. Smedley returned to New York, where his illustrations sold for top prices, but in the early twentieth century he decided to focus on portraiture.

C. S. Reinhart (1844 - 1896) was an American painter and illustrator. He was a nephew of artist Benjamin Franklin Reinhart (1829–1885). He spent the years 1882–86 in Paris where he exhibited regularly in the Salon. As a young artist, he along with Edwin Austin Abbey, Robert Blum, A. B. Frost, and Howard Pyle, studied under Charles Parsons, who was head of the art department at Harper Brothers in the 1870s.

B. West Clinedinst (1859 – 1931) was an American book illustrator and portrait painter. The New International Encyclopedia considered that his "sympathetic collaboration" with the authors of the books he illustrated gave his works "a special charm". The 1890s were filled with much illustration work for Scribner's and Century magazines, but Clinedinst also found time, then and in later years, to illustrate the books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain. Meanwhile, he kept up with his practice in portraiture, painting such celebrities as Twain, Admiral Perry, and Theodore Roosevelt.