Poor Cecco

London: Chatto & Windus, 1925. First English trade edition (no English limited edition was issued). Quarto (10 x 7 1/4 inches; 253 x 186 mm.). Collating 175, [1]. Original orange cloth pictorially stamped and lettered in red on front cover and lettered in red on spine. Blank endpapers. Seven mounted color plates and twenty-four drawings in black and white. A Very Good copy in the scarce original color pictorial dust jacket (jacket complete but with some repairs).

"Margery Williams Bianco's third children's book, the much admired Poor Cecco (1925), is the story of a wooden toy, a 'loose-jointed thing like a dog', who gets out of the toy cupboard and has a lengthy series of adventures with his friend Bulka the rag puppy. The first edition was illustrated by Arthur Rackham" (The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature). The text, with the same plates and drawings, first appeared in magazine form in Good Housekeeping, beginning in May 1925. This, the rarest of all the Rackham limited editions was actually never signed by Rackham. The 105 copies were numbered and signed by Margery Williams Bianco, this copy however apparently escaped the signing process. The text, with the same illustrations by Rackham, also appeared in Good Housekeeping beginning in May 1925. No limited English edition was issued.

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.