Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling - Arthur Rackham - First Edition Children's Books - Antique Book, Vintage Book, 1900s

First American edition of Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling

Written by Rudyard Kipling. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. First American edition, October 1906. Doubleday, Page & Company.

WELAND'S SWORD
"The children were at the Theatre, acting to Three Cows as much as they could remember of Midsummer Night's Dream. Their father had made them a small play out of the big Shakespeare one, and they had rehearsed it with him and with their mother till they could say it by heart. They began where Nick Bottom the weaver comes out of the bushes with a donkey's head on his shoulder, and finds Titania, Queen of the Fairies, asleep. Then they skipped to the part where Bottom asks three little fairies to scratch his head and bring him honey, and they ended where he falls asleep in Titania's arms. Dan was Puck and Nick Bottom, as well as all three Fairies. He wore a pointy-eared cloth cap for Puck, and a paper donkey's head out of a Christmas cracker - but it tore if you were not careful - for Bottom. Una was Titania, with a wreath of columbines and a foxglove wand."

Journalist, author, poet, and children's book author Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936) wrote The Jungle Book, Kim, and The Man Who Would Be King, and poetry, including Mandalay and Gunga Din, and was a master of the short story. Born in Mumbai (Bombay), India, Kipling wrote of the Britain he knew and loved, and could still criticize, at the height of its Empire. At age 41, he was the first and youngest English literary figure to received the Nobel Prize in literature.

In Puck of Pook's Hill, a fantasy book, Shakespeare's character Puck from "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and "the oldest old thing in England", tells the history of England through two children who Puck plucks out of time to narrate a series of short stories and poems.

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Condition*: Very Good. Lacks dust jacket as issued. Forest green buckram cover has small, hard to see moisture stain on the back. The frontispiece with tissue is detached but intact, untorn. The illustrated plates by Arthur Rackham are present and accounted for. The page containing the first poem and the facing page are unopened (as opposed to "uncut").

* Based on guidelines of the Independent Online Booksellers' Association.