Imagina

New York: Duffield & Company, 1914. First edition. Quarto (9 1/2 x 7 5/16 inches; x 242 x 185 mm.). Collating [12], 178, [1], [1, blank]. Publisher's light blue cloth pictorially stamped and lettered in gilt on front cover and lettered in gilt on spine. Pictorial endpapers in pale blue and white by Lauren Ford. Two color plates by Arthur Rackham (including frontispiece) and numerous black and white drawings in the text by Lauren Ford. Housed in a fleece-lined quarter green morocco clamshell case. Rear inner hinge slightly cracked, otherwise a Near Fine copy.

A young, motherless boy, a dreamer who secretly loves poetry, yearns to be held and loved by the beautiful woman he has conjured in his mind in the dim moonlight - Imagina - and communes with trees, birds, flowers, and his dog, Kit, all of whom understand and accept him as he is rather than how his no-nonsense guardian would prefer him to be.

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 123. See Latimore and Haskell 42.