Feats on the Fjord

London/New York: J.M. Dent & Sons Limited/E.P. Dutton & Company, 1914. Second edition. Publisher's original blue cloth pictorially and ornamentally stamped in gilt, gilt lettered and ornamented spine with "Dent London" at foot. Onlaid color plate to upper board and blue cloth label with "With Many Coloured Illustrations" pasted over small rectangular panel. Original pictorial dust jacket (with "J.M. Dent & Sons" at foot printed in green at foot). Neat gift signature to front paste-down. With all the plates in color, in an unrecorded binding variant. Octavo (7 x 5 in; 178 x 127 mm). 128 pages. Eight color plates, including frontispiece (all dated 1899). A Fine copy in the very scarce dust jacket (jacket slightly chipped at top and bottom of spine).

Both Latimore & Haskell and Riall note binding in red or green cloth but not blue, as here. The half-title reads: Tales for Children from Many Lands Edited by F.C. Tilney. "I have seen a copy that causes a confusion as to which is the 1st edition. The cover has a label pasted over With Coloured Illustrations by Arthur Rackham to change the title to With coloured illustrations , and on the title page there is no mention of Coloured by W. Cubitt Cooke. There may have been a mistake of ommitting the the colouring had been done by another on the title page so the pasted plate was added to the cover until the 2nd. issue" (Riall).
Just to complicate matters further - our copy has the label on the front cover AND Coloured by W. Cubitt Cooke on the title-page. In the first edition of 1899 [The Temple Classics for Young People], the twelve plates, with the exception of the frontispiece, are in black and white, and the title page thus lacks the credit to W. Cubitt Cooke.

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.

Riall 122.