The Cruise of the Jasper B.

A mild newspaperman comes into money and buys an old schooner stuck in a mud creek on Long Island, and the crew, the cargo and the plot of a pirate romance arrive to meet it — including a mutiny, a treasure and a girl. Marquis wrote a daily column for twenty-five years and filled it with archy the cockroach, a free-verse poet in a former life; this 1916 book is a parody of adventure fiction that is also a perfectly good adventure. Sixty plates of painting, from Winslow Homer to Howard Pyle, carry the sea, the pirates and the old romance that this parody sails straight into.