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[KELLIEGRAM Binding]. CARROLL, Lewis. Through the Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There. With Fifty Illustrations by John Tenniel. Sixty-Eighth Thousand. London: Macmillan and Co., 1927.
Later printing. Octavo (7 1/16 x 4 5/8 in; 179 x 117 mm). [14], 231, [1, printer's slug] pp. Frontispiece, forty-nine black and white text illustrations.
A spectacular Kelliegram pictorial binding, ca. 1927, stamp-signed "Kelliegram Binding London," of full dark green crushed morocco. Covers decoratively panelled in gilt, with five characters from the story depicted in multi-colored morocco onlays on each cover. The front cover with central onlay of Humpty Dumpty in brown, red, pale green, black, blue and beige morocco and corner onlays of: the White Queen, the Red Queen, Haigha (the Messenger), and Hatta (the other Messenger). The lower cover reiterates the upper's design with a central onlay of the Walrus in brown red, pale green and beige morocco and corner onlays of: the Carpenter, the Old Sheep, Tweedledum & Tweedledee, the Frog and the Carpener. Spine richly gilt in compartments with dots and pictorial devices. Five raised bands with gilt dots. Turn-ins with gilt corner devices. Amber silk endpapers. All edges gilt. A very fine copy. Housed in the original green cloth drop-back clamshell case.
[The beautifully inlaid and colorful] "Kelliegram bindings were one of many innovations of the English commercial binding firm of Kelly & Sons. The Kelly family had one of the longest connections in the history of the binding trade in London, having been founded in 1770 by John Kellie, as the name was then spelled. The binding firm was carried on by successive members of the family into the 1930s. William Henry Kelly significantly developed the company in the first half of the nineteenth century, followed by William Henry, Jr., Henry, and Hubert Kelly, who took control in 1892, taking the firm into the twentieth centuryThe development [during the 1880s] that came to be known as Kelliegram was one of the bindery's most notable, and the popularity continues today as demonstrated by the prices Kelliegram bindings command at auction and in the rare book trade" (Dooley, Kelliegram Bindings, http://www.brynmawr.edu/Library/mirabile/mirabile2/kelliegram.html).
Price: $8,500
(To order this item, or for more information, please call 818-222-4103)
