Friedrich Gerstäcker (1816 -1872), a popular German travel writer during the 19th century, is the author of today’s Random Book Cover & Illustrations of the Day. Gerstäcker initially became famous when his mother, unbeknownst to him, published his letters from his travels in Arkansas and Louisiana, and the writer returned home to discover he had become a celebrity. He went on to travel back across the U.S. by train and through Central and South America and Australia, ultimately publishing over 40 volumes of travel narratives. His writing is characterized by one contemporary critic as part of a larger genre of “ethnographic romances” (and Chateaubriand‘s Atala probably lies somewhere near the head of this lineage.)

This (incomplete) cloth-bound edition is from the late 19th century and I’m featuring it for its interesting author and for the pretty paste-down illustration on its cover. I haven’t read his work, but am intrigued by descriptions of conditions in the early United States by outsiders (like Toqueville!)

Some free online translations of Gerstäcker’s books (although he wrote much, so completists may wish to crate-dig further at their own leisure):

• Wild Sports in the Far West (trans. 1864; orig. Streif- und Jagdzüge durch die Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika, 1844) – Archive.org, Google Books
• Western Lands and Western Waters (1864) – Archive.org
• Adventures in the Tropics (1868) – Archive.org

Here’s my physical copy of a couple German volumes of the author:

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And some lovely full-color crayon illustrations from that 1864 English edition of Wild Sports in the Far West:

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Note: These images are in the public domain. For more information, see A Primer on Image Rights on OBA.