Alphabet Pour les tout petits

Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1947. First Edition. Hardcover. Paper pastedown. Very Good Plus. Josette Boland. ABC with a pietistic overtone. Notwithstanding the adherence to Roman Catholic Church sensibilities, the illustrations have a charm that can touch anyone, and few, even atheists and anti-Papists, won't find this a lovely ABC. 8vo. 22.5 by 19.5 cm. Unpaginated, 28 pages. Title, copyright page, then one page per letter, with color printed illustrations on every page with a letter. Examples of the religious bent of the ABC are "S" is for "Sainte", and "R", for "Roi", shows the three kings. Arguably there is also some anti-Semitic tropes, such as "H", for "Herod", lambasts the Jewish king. But by no means are all the letters so fraught. "T", for "Tulipe", is neutral. Color illustrations are quite bright, with a generous amount of gilt and silver. They could almost pass as pochoir, in our view. Each letter has accompanying text of six to eight lines of verse elaborating on whatever is being illustrated. The cover has some age toning around the perimeter and perhaps some very light inconspicuous stains. There is a small tape repair by the spine strip -- the tape is a close match to the spine and board paper pastedown and while it would ordinarily be regarded by us as a rather ugly amateur repair, we think best to leave it alone. A blank prelim leaf has a few stray colored pencil/crayon markings, and one can find a few insignificant light marks afterward, but overall the pages are close to immaculate, or come off as such. At the hinge between "H" and "I", one can espy the mull, or the spine innards. We again would choose to live with this instance of over-opening. In our view, the book is still a most attractive copy, and one will have difficulty locating a superior copy to this one.