RACKHAM, Arthur, illustrator; BARRIE, J.M.

Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1906. Item #06464

Arthur Rackham's Peter Pan
The First Trade Edition - Handsomely Bound

[RACKHAM, Arthur, illustrator]. BARRIE, J.M. Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (From “The Little White Bird”). With Drawings by Arthur Rackham. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1906.

First trade edition. Quarto (9 3/4 x 7 1/4 inches; 247 x 184 mm.). xii, 125, [1] pp. Color frontispiece and forty-nine mounted color plates on brown paper, each with descriptive tissue-guard. Four black and white illustrations (including title vignette). A few leaves with very light foxing, otherwise a clean, bright, and excellent copy, the plates fresh and vibrant as usual.

Handsomely bound in 1976 in full brown morocco, covers ruled in gilt with a geometric panel design incorporating stylized floral onlays in a warm contrasting tone, smooth spine with similar floral inlays, lettered in gilt, green linear patterned endpapers, signed in blind on rear urn-in “19 AB 76”, all edges gilt. Original cloth covers bound in at end. A most attractive and well-executed binding with a quarter brown morocco over green linear patterned board chemise, lettered in gilt on spine, in turn housed in a similar patterned board slipcase, morocco spine of chemise faded.

The present binding, though unidentified, is of a quality entirely consistent with the better English binderies supplying the antiquarian trade in the post-war period.

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: $1,650.00