Title: Ride a Cock-Horse and Other Nursery Rhymes. ...
Publisher: Chatto & Windus, London
Publication Date: 1940
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Good-
Edition: 1st Edition
First Edition, first impression- without the slightly later printed dedication 'For Sebastian'. 4to. 28 printed pages. Illustrated paper-covered boards reproducing two of the colour illustrations. Fourteen nursery thymes, each one accompanied by a full-page illustration, ten of which are hand-coloured using the pochoir process. Contemporary ink inscription on front free endpaper, dated January 1940, corrected in the same hand to 1941. Provenance: Patricia Tait.
190 x 255 mm. Original paper cover boards with coloured full-page designs on both covers (the paper border has persihed in several tiny spots and in a larger area on the outer edge of the front cover, and the same to a greater extent on the back cover, just mildly affecting the Chatto & Windus lettering). Complete with original similarly decorated dustwrapper (dustwrapper has degenerated at the folds for the flaps, is mildly discoloured and has slight losses near the head and tail of the central portion).
"[Ride a Cock-Horse] was quite easily the most beautifully produced of the books that Mervyn illustrated. The war had started, but the paper shortage and the many restrictions connected with publishing hadn't yet begun to make their indelible mark on war-time books" - Maeve Gilmore, 'A World Away'. It was Peake's second illustrated book and preceded his illustrations in the edition of Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark.
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