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.
Kate Greenaway
London: Adam and Charles Black, 1905. Item #06438
Edition de Luxe, with an Exceptional Original Pencil Sketch by Kate Greenaway
[GREENAWAY, Kate]. SPIELMANN, M.H., and G.S. LAYARD. Kate Greenaway. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1905.
Edition de Luxe. Limited to 500 numbered copies (this copy being No. 123), signed by the artist’s brother, John Greenaway. Large quarto (10 1/2 x 8 1/8 inches; 267 x 206 mm.). xix, [1], 300, [1], [3, blank] pp. Color frontispiece and fifty-three color plates after Kate Greenaway, with descriptive tissue guards, and numerous black and white illustrations, including thirty-four half-tone plates.
Publisher's white cloth over beveled boards with front cover and spine lettered in gilt and decoratively stamped in blind in a geometric and floral design. Top edge gilt. Color pictorial endpapers. One tiny (1/8 inch) tear to top of spine. Lower corners very slightly bumped. Otherwise a near fine copy.
Of particular importance - and elevating this copy well beyond the standard issue - is the presence of an original pencil sketch by Kate Greenaway, one of the most charming and immediate survivals of her hand to be found in the Edition de Luxe.
Executed in delicate graphite with her characteristic economy of line, the drawing depicts six small schoolboys in Greenaway’s quintessential late-Victorian idiom, clad in soft-brimmed hats and loose, gently falling garments. The group is informally arranged - some seated, some standing - around a simple architectural element (likely a stair rail), creating a natural, almost candid moment of childhood sociability. One boy reclines loosely in the foreground, introducing a subtle asymmetry and liveliness rarely preserved in the more formalized printed versions.
What distinguishes this sketch - and makes it decidedly superior to the published illustration - is its freshness, immediacy, and unmediated charm. The figures are rendered with a lightness and freedom absent from the engraved or process-reproduced plates, where the softness of Greenaway’s pencil is inevitably tightened and somewhat flattened. Here, one sees the artist thinking: slight hesitations in line, gentle reworking of contours, and a fluidity of gesture that conveys both movement and personality. The accompanying manuscript caption, written in Greenaway’s own hand:
“Nell, there was another little boy at the same scool [sic], whose name was Richard.” adds a further layer of intimacy - likely drawn from a narrative context or personal correspondence - and preserves the artist’s charming orthographic idiosyncrasy (“scool”), reinforcing the authenticity and spontaneity of the piece.
“Containing upwards of 80 full page illustrations, 53 of which are reproduced in facsimile from original water-colour drawings by Kate Greenaway. There are also numerous thumb nail sketches with pen and pencil throughout the text, many of them from letters to Ruskin. Few of the illustrations have ever been published before. The Edition de Luxe is limited to 500 copies…each copy being signed by Mr. John Greenaway and numbered. It contains the earliest impressions of the illustrations, and the letterpress is printed on hand-made paper. Bound in white vellum cloth, gilt top…Each of these copies contains an original pencil sketch by Kate Greenaway…Fifteen Extra Copies. Each of these copies contains at least one original water-color sketch by Kate Greenaway” (Publisher’s Prospectus).
Schuster & Engen 226; Thomson 400.
Price: $3,250.00