1 CHAPTER 21 Dante for Mothers Carol Chiodo American public interest in Dante and his Comedy comes alive in an advertisement in a Sears Roebuck and Company mail order catalogue from 1893. For forty-five cents, a reader in Wichita, Kansas could purchase the poetry of Dante along with the work of distinguished American poets such as John Greenleaf Whittier and Edgar Allan Poe. These were books destined to burnish backcountry bookshelves: printed in duodecimo format on toned paper with gilded pages, clothbound, and stamped in black and gold. This mail-order Dante marked just one of the ways that the Comedy circulated as a bound bauble, both novelty and commodity, in the midwestern United States at the close of the nineteenth century. Sears customers were not the only readers to value Dante’s poem. Lest we imagine that the poem merely decorated the parlors of aspiring book-collectors, other editions imagined American mothers and their children to be the ideal recipients for the poem’s message. The year before Dante appeared in the mail order catalogue, a kindergarten educator from Chicago, Elizabeth Harrison, published his poetry in The Vision of Dante. A Story for Little Children and a Talk for Their Mothers. This slim volume was printed by the same printer of the Sears Roebuck catalog, R.R. Donnelley & Sons, on behalf of the Chicago Kindergarten College. 1 A bauble of a different sort, Harrison’s Story was artfully made, with woodcut illustrations by English artist Walter Crane and a softcover of creamy handmade paper featuring embossed