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.
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1906. Item #06277
Arthur Rackham's Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
First American Trade Edition With Fifty Mounted Color Plates
[RACKHAM, Arthur, illustrator]. BARRIE, J.M. Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (From 'The Little White Bird'). With Drawings by Arthur Rackham. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1906.
First American trade edition. Quarto (9 3/4 x 7 3/16 inches; 247 x 182 mm.). xii, [1, blank], [1, map of Kensington Gardens], 126 pp. Color frontispiece and forty-nine color plates (collected at the end of the text) mounted on heavy brown paper, with descriptive tissue guards. Four black and white drawings (two on the title and one each on p. 1 and p. 14). Sporadic minimal foxing just affecting some of the descriptive tissue guards.
Publisher's green cloth, front cover pictorially stamped and lettered in gilt, spine decoratively lettered in gilt, gray endpapers. Neat ink inscription (dated 2/9/07) on front free end-paper. Covers with very slight insect nibbling (not through the cloth), one small one inch split on rear joint. Relevant newspaper cutting affixed to rear paste-down.
Still a near fine copy of the first American trade edition of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.
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. 27. Riall, p. 74.
Price: $850.00