National Velvet by Enid Bagnold, modern commemorative edition.

Written by Enid Bagnold. Illustrated by Laurian Jones. Commemorative edition, publication date unknown. William Morrow and Company. New York.

National Velvet, in continuous publication since 1935, tells the story of Velvet Brown, a 14-year-old girl who loves horses and dreams of riding in the Grand National, the most prestigious steeplechase in England. When she wins a raffle for a wild and unruly horse named The Pie, she sees her chance to make her dream come true. With the help of her friend and mentor, Mi Taylor, a former jockey, she trains The Pie secretly and enters him in the race under a false name.

Enid Bagnold (1889 - 1981) was a British writer and playwright born in Rochester, Kent. She grew up mostly in Jamaica, where her father was an army officer, and later studied art in London. During World War I, she worked as a nurse and a driver, and wrote about her experiences in her first books, A Diary Without Dates and The Happy Foreigner. She married Sir Roderick Jones, the chairman of Reuters news agency, in 1920 and had four children. She became famous for her novel National Velvet, which tells the story of a young girl who wins the Grand National horse race. She also wrote several other novels, such as The Squire and The Loved and Envied, and successful plays, such as The Chalk Garden and A Matter of Gravity.

PLEASE NOTE: This edition is a commemorative reprint of the original first US edition of National Velvet. It is not the first US edition, or a Book of the Month Club (BOMC) edition. National Velvet was first published in the UK in 1935, and in the U.S. the same year by William Morrow and Company, followed by the Book of the Month Club edition. Publication history of this William Morrow edition is unknown. The book has no ISBN, Library of Congress listing, barcode, or BOMC identifiers. (Lack of a price on the front flap doesn't point to BOMC in this case.)

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Condition: Near Fine/Very Good. Dust jacket: Fading along spine and upper edge; very light wear along upper edge. Quarter-bound silver-embossed red/black cloth cover boards. Pages are clean, undamaged, and complete.