Winnie-the-Pooh. With Decorations by Ernest H. Shepard.

MILNE, A.A.; Decorations by Ernest Shephard.

Item Number: 21075

London: Methuen and Co, 1926.

Signed extra limited edition, number 10 of 20 copies on Japanese vellum signed by both author and illustrator. Quarto, original vellum. Inscribed with an original poem handwritten in Milne’s hand as follows, “Vincent Seligman His Book. I know a bank where Vincent goes, And what he does God only knows, But something shady, I suppose. Yet he respects the worst of crooks Whose partiality for books Leads him to buy a Pooh-de-luxe. Doubtless the vellum covering  Desired him, and he thought the Haine The pass-book of some Banker King. October, 1927. A.A. Milne.” The recipient, Vincent Seligman was a banker who ran the London bank Seligman Brothers. He and his wife Barbara were close friends of the Milnes. In 1923 Seligman dedicated his book, Oxford Oddities, to A.A. Milne and, soon after the publication of the Pooh books, Milne gave prototypes of Pooh and Piglet soft toys to Barbara. Housed in a full morocco clamshell box with a Winnie the Pooh inset on the front panel.

“Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh has been considered a classic of children’s literature almost since its publication” (Cooper & Cooper). In 1925, A.A. Milne purchased “a Sussex farmhouse for use as a weekend and holiday alternative to the family’s London home… [that would] provide the setting for the stories he now started to write about [his son] Christopher’s toys… Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner [its companion volume, published 1928] are, on their own terms, more successful as works written for children than anything else produced during children’s literature’s Golden Age” (Carpenter). “Ernest H. Shepard’s illustrations, modeled after the actual toys, show character and movement in simple line vignettes, which add so much to the books that most people consider them to be inseparable from the texts” (Silvey).