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Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
London: Hodder & Stoughton Limited, 1912. Item #06253
The 1912 Rackham Peter Pan
[RACKHAM, Arthur, illustrator]. BARRIE, J.M. Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. From The Little White Bird by J.M. Barrie. A New Edition. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. London: Hodder & Stoughton, n.d. [after 1912].
First trade edition, later issue, of the 1912 new edition (second Rackham edition) with a new color frontispiece and an additional seven full-page black and white plates.
Large quarto (10 9/16 x 8 1/4 inches; 269 x 210 mm.). [viii], 125, [1] pp. Fifty tipped-in color plates mounted onto green card with descriptive tissue guards, seven full-page black and white plates and twelve black and white drawings in the text.
Publisher's smooth green cloth pictorially stamped in gilt on front cover and spine, plain cream endpapers. Gilt on spine a little dull, tiny area of wear to lower joint. A very good copy.
J.M. Barrie’s novel The Little White Bird (1902) “contains the first sketches for Peter Pan. The narrator is ‘a gentle, whimsical, lonely old bachelor’, an author by profession, whose ambition is to have a son. He meets a penniless young couple whose own son David becomes a substitute in his affections. He explains to David that ‘all children in our part of London were once birds in the Kensington Gardens; and that the reason there are bars on nursery windows and a tall fender by the fire is because very little people sometimes forget that they no longer have wings, and try to fly away through the window or up the chimney.’ The central chapters of the book tell the story of one such child, Peter Pan, who ‘escaped from being a human when he was seven days old…and flew back to the Kensington Gardens’…The Peter Pan chapters of The Little White Bird were re-issued in 1906 as Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, with colour plates by Arthur Rackham; this was the book which first made Rackham’s work famous. It should not be confused with Peter and Wendy (1911), Barrie’s novelization of the play Peter Pan” (The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature).
Latimore and Haskell, p. 40. Riall, p. 114.
Price: $850.00