First edition. Edition de Luxe, number 336 of 500 copies signed by Arthur Rackham. Large 4to. Full white vellum with gilt lettering and decoration. Top edge gilt and others untrimmed. Yellow ribbon ties. Author's presentation copy to close friend and future literary agent, inscribed by J.M.Barrie on the half title, "Golding Bright, with a friend's greeting J.M.Barrie" Endpaper with map of Kensington Gardens and 50 colour plates mounted onto brown art paper and protected by captioned tissue guards. The plates for this version of Barrie's tale are magnificent. A very good copy indeed, with a little bruising to the base of the spine, but generally bright and clean. Ribbon ties not original. Internally fine and clean.

A superb association copy of the first separate edition of Peter Pan, inscribed by the author to his close friend and theatrical agent Reginald Golding Bright.
Golding Bright and his elder brother Addison Bright both worked as literary and theatrical agents. Barrie was originally Addison Bright's client. However, in 1906 Addison Bright was found to be embezzling his clients' money and unable to face the shame of being tried for it, fled to Lucerne, where he committed suicide (see Jonkers Catalogue 62, item 113 for the first edition of The Little White Bird inscribed to Addison Bright).
Barrie who had suffered heavy losses bore the family no ill and accompanied Golding Bright to Lucerne to identify the body. Later that year Golding Bright became Barrie's theatre agent and remained so for the rest of the author's life. His appointment as Barrie's agent coincided with the publication of Peter Pan and,one must assume, with the author's presentation of this copy to Golding Bright.
The story of Peter Pan had its genesis in the 1902 novel "the Little White Bird", the central chapters of which tell of a child "... who escaped from being a human when he was seven days old... and flew back to Kensington Gardens". Barrie developed this story both into a play (first performed in 1904 but not published until 1928) and this book of 1906, the first to appear with the title of Peter Pan to which Arthur Rackham provided fifty magnificent colour illustrations.
A contemporary review of this book published in "The World" reads "Mr. Barrie has done what no one else has done since the inventor of "Alice", he has invented a new legend, a modern folk story which comprehends all the innermost secrets of the modern child, be he four or forty. Mr. Rackham, for his part, has been bewitched in his cradle: he does not dream of fairies or hobgoblins, he knows them."

PROVENANCE: From the library of Golding Bright; subsequently a private collection in America.

Stock ID: 32382