Aesop's Fables

London: William Heinemann, 1912. First trade edition. Small square octavo (8 x 5 7/8 inches; 202 x 149 mm.). Collating xxix, [1, blank], 223, [1]. Complete with the original color pictorial dust jacket, the front panel with a reproduction of the color plate facing p. 84 "The Blackamoor", the spine correctly priced "6/= net" and advertising the 1912 Heinemann publication "The Four Gardens on the back". Dust jacket chipped at lower left of front panel, small chip on lower right corner, and small chip at top of spine, but with no loss of lettering. One small 'tape' stain at top of jacket spine. An excellent example of this original pictorial dust jacket. (truncated) Publisher's green cloth, front cover and spine pictorially decorated and lettered in gilt, lower cover with publisher's blind stamp, pictorial end-papers printed in green, top edge stained green. Very slight browning on pictorial front end-paper from loosely inserted Leicester Galleries leaflet. Thirteen color plates, including frontispiece, with captioned tissue guards, fifty-three black and white drawings of which nineteen are full page. A Fine and bright copy.

The 1st century AD philosopher, Apollonius of Tyana, is recorded as having said about Aesop: "like those who dine well off the plainest dishes, he made use of humble incidents to teach great truths, and after serving up a story he adds to it the advice to do a thing or not to do it. Then, too, he was really more attached to truth than the poets are; for the latter do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable; but he by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events" (Philostratus Book V, 14).

Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) is perhaps the most acclaimed and influential illustrators of the Golden Age of Illustration. A prolific artist even from his youth, Rackham got his start as an illustrator working for the Westminster Budget Newspaper (1892). Over the next few years, he took on more and more commissions for children’s books, hitting his career high in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Rackham turned his imaginative pen to every classic—from Shakespeare to Dickens to Poe.

Latimore and Haskell 38-39. Riall 111. (Inventory #: 3745)