Daffy Goes to Sea

Beryl Irving’s second book, a sailing story published by Nisbet in London in 1932, with a jacket painted by C. Cavania Sanders and her own frontispiece. It had been hard to find for many years. This is how it came back into print, with every picture kept.

What we started with

The book has sixteen chapters: Daffy Hetherington, fifteen, parked for the summer with a dull elderly cousin in a small fishing town, until a storm brings the yacht Gent Peter into harbour. After the novel comes a second, shorter story, Daffy Goes to Sea Again, first printed in a girls’ annual, with about fifteen of her pen drawings.

The text, set again

Every word was set again in new type rather than photographed from an old page, so the type is sharp at any size and the ebook can follow it. The new edition runs to 211 pages. The author’s spelling and the punctuation of the 1932 printing are kept; plain printer’s errors are corrected.

The first page of Chapter Two in the new edition: Daffy Meets the Derricks — Page 13 of the new edition: Chapter Two, *Daffy Meets the Derricks*.

The pictures, kept where she put them

The frontispiece faces the title page, as it did in 1932. The pen drawings of the second story sit beside the passages they belong to. Nothing has been redrawn, and no part of any picture has been made, extended or filled by AI.

The best surviving source for the frontispiece is soft, and it prints softer than her line drawings. We would rather print what survives than sharpen it into something she did not draw.

Beryl Irving’s frontispiece: a ship’s cabin, a child reaching up to a man in a captain’s cap while two girls watch — The frontispiece, as it stands in the new edition.

A pen drawing from the second story: two girls and a sailor on a quay heave a line while a man topples into the water — One of her pen drawings for *Daffy Goes to Sea Again*.

The cover

The new cover of Daffy Goes to Sea, carrying C. Cavania Sanders’ jacket painting of a yacht under sail — The new cover.

The new cover carries Sanders’ painting from the 1932 jacket.

Proof

Proofing is where a book is saved from small errors. Preparing the files for this edition, we found the author’s own name mis-set on the title page, as BERYL IRYING, and reset it in the title’s own typeface.

The finished book

Hardback, paperback and ebook, printed to order in the United Kingdom, published by Dawnchild Books, our imprint for children and the home.

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