THE PRIVATELY PUBLISHED AMBLESIDE EDITION
The Fairy Caravan
Privately printed, Ambleside, 1929.
First edition, one of 100 copies to be privately printed by the author. Small 4to. Cloth backed blue-grey paper covered boards with title printed on upper cover in black. Illustrated by Beatrix Potter with six colour plates and numerous black and white line drawings. A fine copy. Exceptionally clean and crisp. Internally perfect and largely unopened.
This book, which is of a semi-autobiographical nature, was written from Potter's personal jottings about her beloved Lakeland and its people.
"She had no intention of producing another book until Alexander McKay came over from Philadelphia and persuaded her to do so. It was intended that this book should be published only in America, and would contain some of her writings about her farm animals in a fairy caravan setting...
Beatrix Potter did not wish for an English edition of The Fairy Caravan, because she felt the stories were 'too personal - too autobiographical'...
Her next concern was to obtain English copyright... So she asked for one hundred sets of sheets to be sent over in order to have them bound privately. This was done by George Middleton, printers and publisher's Ambleside, Westmorland.
In the privately bound copies of the The Fairy Caravan, the first eighteen pages of the American edition, including the preface and the dedication page, were discarded and a new set of pages printed at Ambleside. An additional page was added on which were sketches of dogs that she knew, with there names written underneath." (Linder - The History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter).
Stock ID: 40051
£6,000.00
