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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Figtree3, post: 591169, member: 33&quot;]I found a few sites that give the history of M. A. Donohue &amp; Company. The name first existed in 1901. This page from the Lucile project, compiled by the former head of the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa Library, gives a chronology of names of the publishing company. The website itself is for tracing the publication history of one particular book (not the title you have).</p><p><a href="http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/lucile/publishers/donoma/donoma.htm" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/lucile/publishers/donoma/donoma.htm" rel="nofollow">http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/lucile/publishers/donoma/donoma.htm</a></p><p><br /></p><p>According to that page, the company existed under that name starting in 1901. It also says they first used the name as an imprint in 1903. Given that, your edition would not have existed before that date. So it is a later edition. The page above also says that in the early 1900s some time the company decided to deal exclusively in children&#039;s books. I&#039;m not sure whether the edition you have was considered to be a children&#039;s version or not, so that doesn&#039;t really help to date it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Another clue is no copyright or publication date given. That often happened with the publishers of later, less expensive editions. Or sometimes they just gave the original copyright date that might belong to a different publisher (Grosset &amp; Dunlap did that quite often). It can be very difficult to find the exact publication date. One thing you might want to try if you have the time is to find copies of the American publication called <i>Publishers Weekly</i>. Some of those are available online through the Internet Archive and other sites, but many are not. The American publishers often advertised when they issued new editions. I don&#039;t know where you are located so don&#039;t know if this is feasible for you.</p><p><br /></p><p>As to why they re-used a cover design that was originally from one of their other books I would say that perhaps it was to save expenses by not having to design a different cover on this edition. But that is just speculation. I found one with a somewhat redesigned cover, issued by the same publisher, held at the University of Florida libraries:</p><p><a href="http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00009631/00001/1j" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00009631/00001/1j" rel="nofollow">http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00009631/00001/1j</a></p><p><br /></p><p>So at some point they did pay for a redesign...</p><p>And it&#039;s actually pretty close to yours, now that I look more carefully.</p><p><br /></p><p>It&#039;s difficult to do research on book covers on popular editions from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as publishers often switched cover designs and colors of covers. I&#039;ve never seen any later studies as to why publishers did that.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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