A Dish of Apples (Signed limited edition)

London & New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1921. First thus. Near Fine. Edition deluxe, number 398 of 500 copies, numbered and signed by the artist. A Near Fine copy. Small quarto (10 x 7 5/8 in; 254 x 193 mm). 75, (3) pp. Illustrated with three full-page mounted illustrations in color with tissue guards and twenty-three drawings in black and white. Pictorial end papers and engraved bookplate on front paste-down. Publisher's cream cloth pictorially stamped in gilt, very slight soiling to the cloth. In a very early, possibly original (?) acetate dust jacket. With a previous owner's bookplate on the front paste-down. Housed in blue cloth clamshell case.

Eden Phillpotts' A Dish of Apples is a poetry collection celebrating the seasonal and pastoral, with a particular emphasis on the fruits of harvesttime. Phillpotts (1861-1960) was an English novelist, poetry, and dramatist known for his Dartmoor cycle and the novel Widecombe Fair. Fred Gettings sees the painting-like illustrations in this book as evidence of Rackham's maturing style, although readers will still delight in his mischievous elves and fairies amongst bucolic scenery. Phillpotts wrote of Rackham's illustrations: "I am immensely pleased at the charm & originality of your most attractive drawings. The humor of them especially drew me" (Hudson).

Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) is perhaps the most acclaimed and influential illustrator 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.

Latimore and Haskell, p. 54. Riall, p. 144. Gettings, p. 179. Hudson, p. 170. Near Fine.