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.
Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, The
London: Constable & Company Ltd., 1909. Item #06476
Second and Best Trade Edition
With Forty Mounted Color Plates by Arthur Rackham
RACKHAM, Arthur, illustrator]. [GRIMM, Jakob and Wilhelm]. The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Translated by Mrs. Edgar Lucas. London: Constable & Company Ltd., 1909.
Second and Best Trade Edition. Large quarto (9 5/8 x 7 inches; 244 x 178 mm.). xv, [1], 325, [1, colophon] pp. Forty mounted color plates with descriptive tissue-guards and forty-five drawings in black and white (nine full-page). Title-page printed in red and black.
Bound c. 1960 by Sangorski & Sutcliffe in three-quarter red morocco over red cloth boards ruled in gilt, spine with five raised bands decoratively tooled and lettered in gilt in compartments, red cockerel endpapers, top edge gilt. Original red cloth front cover, spine and endpapers bound in at end. Descriptive tissue for plate facing p. [128] repaired with sellotape, a few of the mounted color plates with slight creases to lower corners. Spine faded, but still a very good copy of this, the best Rackham illustrated edition.
“Reprinted from the 1900 edition, with added illustrations and larger pages” (Latimore and Haskell), and others redrawn and colored. "Rackham's illustrations to Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen or Poe show him at his most imaginative" (Hamilton, p. 11).
"The first year of the new century marked a turning point in Rackham's career, for in it were published his original illustrations for Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm...The book was immediately successful, and its publication marked the beginning of Rackham's lasting fame. Two new editions were called for within ten years. At intervals from 1900 onwards Rackham worked on the original drawings, partially or entirely redrawing some of them on colour, adding new ones in colour and in back-and-white, and generally overhauling them as a set, until the final and best-known edition, of 1909, contained forty coloured illustrations and fifty-five line drawings...a comparison between the first and the last editions of his Grimm emphasizes the remarkable progress that Rackham made in a decade" (Hudson, p. 47-8).
Latimore and Haskell, p. 34. Riall, p. 97.
Price: $1,250.00