More than 1,500 sheet music covers from the Tin Pan Alley era on Hawaii music, as well as some on the South Seas in general, make this book the ultimate work on this subject. The cover art of the Hawaii sheet music in the period of the so-called Territorial Years of the Hawaiian Islands from 1900 to 1959 shows great variety. Similar, sometimes even seemingly the same, yet each cover unique in its own right, they show the diversity of artistic approaches to illustrating stereotypical images of the Hawaiian Islands and the South Seas. This book is a contribution to the study of historical popular media. It allows comparison of the graphic styles and motifs of the covers of the early decades of the 20th century, when domestic music-making with upright pianos was still a central part of social life in the United States. Hermann Mückler is a (visual) historian, cultural anthropologist and an avid collector of pop-culture items about the South Seas. He is a professor at the University of Vienna and has written and edited more than 30 books, most of them on South Seas topics. In this tome, most of his own Hawaii sheet music collection is shown, supplemented by some illustrations from other private collections from the USA, New Zealand and Europe.
