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Telling Fortunes by Tea Leaves (jacket) or Fortune Telling by Tea Leaves (title page)

Cicely Kent (jacket) or Cecily Kent (title page and cover)

This is a remarkably inconsistent book, but then it's all made up anyway. This is one of two books on fortune telling published in 1921 by Herbert Jenkins by the same author. This book has two different titles, unless you accept that the title on the title page is the correct title, but the author's name is spelled differently on the jacket (Cicely) and title page and cover (Cecily), so which is correct? In the other book her name is spelled 'Cicely' on both the jacket and title page but Cecily on the cover, so perhaps you should not accept that the name of the author on the title page is the correct spelling?

The book is listed under the name 'Cecily Kent' in the British Library, as 'Cicely Kent' at Cambridge University, Durham and the National Library of Scotland and, would you believe it, as 'Cicily Kent' at Oxford University. They seem to be the only two books written using this name, or variants of this name, and I can find nothing about the author other than entries on these books, so it was probably a pseudonym.

This title was published in 1922 by Small, Maynard and Company (according to a copy listed on Jisc) and by Dodd, Mead and Company, New York (3rd printing 1927; 5th printing, 1935; 10th printing 1946). It seems to have been more popular in the USA than in the UK.

Telling fortunes using tea leaves or other sediments is called tasseography or tasseomancy which gives it no greater credibility, but I thought you might like to know.

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Dust jacket (click to enlarge)

Dust jacket (click to enlarge)

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