The Wind in the Willows.

GRAHAME, Kenneth; Illustrated by Arthur Rackham.

Item Number: 139439

London: Methuen and Co, 1960.

Finely bound edition of the beloved children’s novel, which author A.A. Milne once referred to as a “household book,” “one of the classic read-aloud books that should not be missed by any family” (Silvey). Octavo, bound in full morocco by Bayntun, illustrated with 12 color plates plus pictorial headpieces by Arthur Rackham, raised bands, morocco spine labels, gilt titles and tooling to the spine, gilt stamp to the front panel, all edges gilt, marbled endpapers, inner dentelles. An exceptional example.

"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). With publisher's six-page Autumn 1908 Announcements laid in. Pierpont Morgan Children's Literature 269.