Just So Stories For Little Children

Description

Original full red pictorial cloth stamped in black and white, after Kipling’s illustrations. White lettering and decor to spine. First impression, first issue, in the second issue binding with the more stable white ink used for lettering (the first issue binding tended to be badly affected by flaking to the white ink). Mild sunning to spine. Moderate wear to base and top spine. Slight wear to board corners. White hardly rubbed. Top edges darkened. Very minor marking to rear board. Small 4to (18.3 x 24.1cm). Endpapers uncracked at gutters. Minor foxing and age-browning to endpapers. Minor pencil annots to rear endpaper. Printer’s emblem to p. (251). Tiny owner’s address label to inside front board, old owner’s signature to front free endpaper. With loose clipping of a collection of memorial tributes to Kipling from the Sunday Times, 19 January, 1936 (Kipling had died on 18 January), including a recollection from Pestonji Bomanji (1851-1938), a Mumbai-based Parsi artist who had studied at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art under Kipling’s father and knew Kipling himself as as a child. Bomanji here recalls Kipling coming into the modelling studio at the J.J. School of Art and inventing ‘childish romances around the models of nymphs, gnomes and gargoyles’. He was the inspiration for the Just So Story ‘How the Rhinoceros got his Wrinkly Skin’, in which a rhinoceros steals a cake from a Parsi ‘from whose hat the rays of the sun were reflected in more-than-oriental splendour’ and lives to regret it, hence the mention in his recollection here: ‘I never remember giving Rudyard a cake …’. Also included are 3 further loose inserts: 1) entry from a bookseller’s catalogue entry for this edition (not this copy); 2) slip of paper with child’s drawing on one side and what seems to be an adult’s record of a child’s response to reading The Elephant’s Child, dated 1979, all in pencil; 3) newspaper cutting with pictures of a baby armadillo, accompanying ‘Beginning of the Armadillos’. With 22 full-page b/w illustrations and numerous vignettes, all by Kipling himself, who although he did not follow his father into painting clearly ‘had a distinct gift’ (ODNB). The Just So Stories, begun as bed-time stories for Kipling’s daughter Josephine, who died in 1899, were published serially from 1897 and in this book edition in 1902. They remain best-beloved classics of children’s literature. Robust packaging. Tracking can be added to overseas orders on request. Used books are exempt from USA tariffs.