The Wind in the Willows.

GRAHAME, Kenneth.

$750.00

Item Number: 143829

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908.

First American edition of Grahame’s beloved children’s novel which preceded the English edition by only four days, with Scribner’s seal on the copyright page. Octavo, original publisher’s cloth, tissue-guarded frontispiece by W. Grahame Robertson. In good condition.

"Unquestionable is the permanence, as an inspired and characteristically English contribution to children's literature, of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows… one of the most endearing books ever written for children… Part of the secret success of the book is that its appeal is ageless and parents never tire of reading it aloud. Like all great books it is inexhaustible" (Eyre, 62). Grahame created his classic as a series of bedtime stories for his four-year-old son, Alastair, who was known as Mouse; yet it also became "in many respects an elegy for the old idyllic English rural life which Grahame could now see was passing away forever" (Carpenter & Prichard, 218). In a letter to Theodore Roosevelt, Grahame described the book as "an expression of the very simplest of joys of life as lived by the simplest beings." C.S. Lewis praised it as "a perfect example of the kind of story which can express things without explaining them" (Carpenter, 168).