The Valley of Color Days by Helen B. Sandwell with Illustrations by Alice Bolam Preston. Little, Brown and Company. 1924. First printing with "Published September, 1924" stated with no listing of later printings. 5 3/4" x 8 3/4" vii, 299 pages Hardcover with no dust jacket. 6 full page color illustrations. Green-brown colored covers with black illustration and lettering on the front cover and spine. Moderate cover edge wear with heavy wear on the cover tips. Some fraying on the bottom cover tips. A bit of smudging to the covers possibly from handling.  It looks like the top of the page block may have been gilt, but has since faded and shows wear. Leading and bottom edges of page block show darkening. Erasure marks on the front end paper. Some separation inside the back cover but the endpaper has not completely separated. there is a black on the  top of pages 285 - 295 plus a small bit on the top of the illustration preceding 285 of unknown source - possibly a burn. This effects no deeper than about 1/8".  Pages 73 and 20 have 2" tears from the bottom of the page with no loss of paper. I also found a page corner fold. No other previous owner markings. I found no other previous owner markings.  No tears, folds or creases to pages but I may have missed some. Binding is tight with no looseness to pages. Not ex-library, not remaindered and not a facsimile reprint. For sale by Jon Wobber, bookseller since 1978. KJ26a 

"In an autobiographical sketch, Helen B. Sandwell notes that as a single woman, she edited a children's page for a Montreal newspaper before the First World War, but it she does not specify which." - https://doceww.dhil.lib.sfu.ca/person/3887

"Alice Bolam Preston (1888–1958) was an American artist and children's book illustrator.
Preston lived in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. She is best known for illustrating children's books in the 1910s and 1920s, primarily for Houghton Mifflin. She had a particular affinity for fairy illustrations. With crisp lines and rich colors, her work is stylistically akin to that of Jessie Willcox Smith or Charles Robinson.[1] Preston also created illustrations and covers for magazines such as Vogue and House Beautiful." - Wikipedia