In both Ahmed is marked as ‘Other’ by his clothing, robes with embellished sleeves that differ greatly from Diana’s western dress. Examining these for markers of difference was very interesting – in the earlier edition, Sheik Ahmed appears almost white, whereas he is clearly darker (although not by much) in the later edition. Perhaps my favourite copy was the 1930 edition printed by the same publisher, which featured another very beautiful picture of the protagonist Diana and the Sheik on the first page. The 1924 edition, while unassuming on the outside, has a very interesting full-colour illustration of Diana and the eponymous Sheik at the back. While the covers were plain, the insides held some amazing art.

The American 1921 version and its equivalent 1925 edition of The Sons of The Sheik, both published by Small, Maynard & Co in Boston, features two engraved icons of lotus flowers next to Hull’s name on the front cover, which again alludes to the Middle Eastern setting. Some editions, however, have designs that allude to the setting of The Sheik a 1921 edition published by George Newnes has a blue cover with intricate designs embedded into the cover and spine, connecting the physical book to the exoticized Arabian desert where the novel takes place. One such example is the 1924 George Newnes edition, which is bound in a cardboard-like material and has no discerning information on the outside (although it was difficult to tell if this was the original binding or added after the fact.) The first edition published by Eveleigh Nash and Company has a similarly bare cover, although in a nicer blue. Many of the surviving early editions I was able to see were plain hardcovers with little embellishment or additional detail on the outside in a way that perhaps can be seen to attest to the “pulp” nature of the novel. As part of my UGRS project, I was given the opportunity to visit the British Library and examine some of the surviving early editions of The Sheik and its sequel, The Sons of The Sheik, to see how contemporary culture affected the way the novel was presented throughout the twentieth century. A hundred and eight different editions of The Sheik were published in the Britain between 19, testifying to the novel’s immense popularity. Hull, which celebrates its hundredth anniversary this year, was one of the most successful romance novels of its time, inspiring two hit silent films starring Rudolph Valentino as well as a slew of copy-cats in the desert romance genre. Following a summer working on an Undergraduate Research Scholarship, Elizabeth Cole presents some reflections on archival research with early editions of E.

The sheik hull