All The Puck Stories.

KIPLING, Rudyard.

Item Number: 121476

London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1935.

First edition of the collected Puck stories. Octavo, original cloth with gilt titles and vignettes to the spine and front panel, illustrated by H. R. Millar and Charles E. Brock, frontispiece in color. In very good condition. Ownership inscription.

Set in multiple periods of English history, Kipling's Puck stories are each narrated to two children living near Burwash, in the High Weald of Sussex, in the area of Kipling's own house Bateman's, by people magically plucked out of history by the elf Puck, or told by Puck himself. (Puck, who refers to himself as "the oldest Old Thing in England", is better known as a character in William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream). The genres of the stories range from authentic historical novella (A Centurion of the Thirtieth, On the Great Wall) to children's fantasy (Dymchurch Flit). Each story is bracketed by a poem which relates in some manner to the theme or subject of the story.