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.
Mother Goose
Chicago: P.F. Volland & Co., 1915. Item #06388
The Classic American “Mother Goose”
Inscribed by the Frederick Richardson to his Grandchildren
[RICHARDSON, Frederick, illustrator]. [GROVER, Eulalie Osgood, editor]. Mother Goose. The Volland Edition. Arranged and Edited by Eulalie Osgood Grover. Illustrated by Frederick Richardson. Chicago: Published by P.F. Volland & Co., [1915].
First Volland edition inscribed by Frederick Richardson to his Grandchildren.
Large quarto (11 15/16 x 8 15/16 inches; 304 x 227 mm.). [120] pp. With 108 full-page color illustrations by Frederick Richardson, printed on coated stock in the rich and luminous palette characteristic of Volland productions.
Original light blue cloth, front cover with a large and elaborately die-cut pictorial onlay laid into a matching blind-stamped panel, a distinctive feature of Volland’s decorative bindings. Color pictorial endpapers. Apart from some light fading to the spine and edges and the most minor evidence of handling, an unusually well-preserved and highly attractive example of a book seldom found in such pleasing condition.
Provenance: Inscribed on the front free endpaper:“To / My dear Grandchildren / from / Grandpa Fred / Christmas 1915” and additionally signed below in full, “Fred Richardson.”
A charming and highly personal presentation copy, bringing the book directly into the illustrator’s own family circle—an association of particular intimacy and rarity.
A quintessential example of the Volland “Happy Children Books” aesthetic, combining durability with exceptional visual appeal through high-quality color printing and imaginative design. Richardson’s illustrations—softly modeled, decorative, and imbued with warmth—rank among the most appealing American interpretations of the Mother Goose tradition, harmonizing perfectly with Grover’s thoughtful arrangement of the classic nursery rhymes.
Frederick Richardson (1862 – 15 January 1937) was an American illustrator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, perhaps best remembered for his illustrations of Mother Goose and the works by L. Frank Baum.
His first illustrated book was L. Frank Baum's Queen Zixi of Ix, which was published serially in St. Nicholas Magazine in 1904 and 1905 and in book form 1905. Richardson also drew pictures for Baum's "A Kidnapped Santa Claus," which first appeared in The Delineator in December 1904. His artwork also appears in the California State Series "Third Reader". He followed that initial work with many other book-illustration projects, including editions of the works of Hans Christian Andersen, Aesop's Fables, Mother Goose, Pinocchio, and East of the Sun and West of the Moon, and two volumes in the series of Andrew Lang's Fairy Books. Richardson also did an abundant amount of work for the Chicago publisher P. F. Volland; in illustrating collections of tales by Georgene Faulkner he varied his usual artistic style, imitating Japanese art for her Little Peachling and Other Tales of Old Japan (1928), and Indian art for her The White Elephant and Other Tales from Old India (1929).
Price: $950.00