I have been in the rare and antiquarian book business for over forty years; my family has been in the rare books business since 1876. Rare books are in my blood.
Poor Cecco
London: Chatto & Windus, 1925. Item #03885
By The Author of The Velveteen Rabbit
First English Trade Edition
[RACKHAM, Arthur, illustrator]. BIANCO, Margery Williams. Poor Cecco. The Wonderful Story of a Wonderful Wooden Dog Who was the Jolliest Toy in the House until He Went out to Explore the World. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. London: Chatto & Windus, 1925.
First English trade edition (no English limited edition was issued). Quarto (10 x 7 1/4 inches; 253 x 186 mm.). 175, [1] pp. Seven mounted color plates and twenty-four drawings in black and white.
Original orange cloth pictorially stamped and lettered in red on front cover and lettered in red on spine. Blank endpapers. Small neat ink signature on front free endpaper. A very good copy.
The text, with the same plates and drawings, first appeared in magazine form in Good Housekeeping, beginning in May 1925.
“The Velveteen Rabbit (1922), [Margery Williams Bianco’s ] first children’s book, was illustrated by William Nicholson. It was followed by another book about a toy, The Little Wooden Doll (1925), for which the illustrator was her own daughter Pamela…Margery Williams Bianco’s third children’s book, the much admired Poor Cecco (1925), is the story of a wooden toy, a ‘loose-jointed thing like a dog’, who gets out of the toy cupboard and has a lengthy series of adventures with his friend Bulka the rag puppy. The first edition was illustrated by Arthur Rackham” (The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature).
Latimore and Haskell, p. 59. Riall, p. 155.
Price: $275.00