The Poppy Seed Cakes, a vintage children's book by Margery Clark and Maud and Miska Petersham. 1943 edition.

Written by Margery Clark. Illustrated by Maud & Miska Petersham. 1943 edition. Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc. Garden City, New York.

"One lovely Saturday morning Andrewshek's Auntie Katushka took some butter and some sugar and some flour and some milk and seven eggs and rolled out some nice little cakes. Then she sprinkled each cake with some of the poppy seeds which she had brought from the old country."

Margery Clark is a pseudonym for the collaborative work of two librarians, Margery Closey Quigley and Mary E. Clark. Born in 1886, Quigley, alongside Clark, co-authored tales that have charmed young readers for generations. Their most celebrated work, "The Poppy Seed Cakes," published in 1924, remains a classic, enchanting children with its whimsical stories and captivating illustrations. Quigley's literary contributions extended beyond children's books, as seen in her work "Portrait of a Library," which was later adapted into a film.

Maud Fuller Petersham (1890 - 1971) was from New York and Miska Petersham (1888 - 1960), born Petrezselyem Mihaly, was from Hungary. They met through work at IAS Studios in 1914 and married three years later, thus beginning a fifty-year collaboration. Their work set the tone for children's book illustration, and together they created more than 120 books. The Poppy Seed Cakes was their first book, and The Rooster Crows won a Caldecott Medal. Their work was characterized by technical excellence, a kaleidoscope of colors, and the introduction of international folk and modernist themes, which helped set a new direction for illustrated children's books.

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Condition: Good. Missing dust jacket. Blue cloth cover boards with red decoration: Light soiling from handling; lightly bumped at the corners. Inside: Name on front paste-down; spill in the gutter of the back paste-down seeped through the last seven pages, leaving small brown stains; front and back fly leaves are missing. Several pages show little finger marks else pages are undamaged and complete.