A Child’s Garden of Verses – Robert Louis Stevenson (1905) (1st thus)

S$82.00

A Child’s Garden of Verses – Robert Louis Stevenson (1905) (1st thus)

S$82.00

Title: A Child’s Garden of Verses

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson, Jessie Willcox Smith (illus)

Publisher: Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1905. First US edition with Jessie Wllcox Smith’s illustrations, published concurrently with the UK edition.

Condition: Pictorial cloth. Fair. Some wear to cover and pages, with some small closed tears to some pages, and a sparse pencil lines to others. With 12 colour plates; some have lost their tissue guards. 125pp. App. 9.5″ by 7″.

SKU: smith-childsverses Categories: , Tag:

About the book (from Wikipedia):

A Child’s Garden of Verses is a collection of poetry for children about childhood, illness, play and solitude by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. The collection first appeared in 1885 under the title Penny Whistles, but has been reprinted many times, often in illustrated versions. It contains about 65 poems including the cherished classics “Foreign Children,” “The Lamplighter,” “The Land of Counterpane,” “Bed in Summer,” “My Shadow” and “The Swing.”

The Land of Story-Books

At evening when the lamp is lit,
Around the fire my parents sit;
They sit at home and talk and sing,
And do not play at anything.

Now, with my little gun, I crawl
All in the dark along the wall,
And follow round the forest track
Away behind the sofa back.

There, in the night, where none can spy,
All in my hunter’s camp I lie,
And play at books that I have read
Till it is time to go to bed.

These are the hills, these are the woods
These are my starry solitudes,
And there the river by whose bring
The roaring lions come to drink.

I see the others far away,
As if in firelit camp they lay,
And I, like to an Indian scout,
Around their party prowled about.

So, when my nurse comes in for me,
Home I return across the sea,
And go to bed with backward looks
At my dear land of Story-books.

About the illustrator (from Wikipedia):

Jessie Willcox Smith (September 6, 1863 – May 3, 1935) was an American female illustrator during the Golden Age of American illustration. She was considered “one of the greatest pure illustrators”. She was a contributor to books and magazines during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Smith illustrated stories and articles for clients such as Century, Collier’s, Leslie’s Weekly, Harper’s, McClure’s, Scribners, and the Ladies’ Home Journal. She had an ongoing relationship with Good Housekeeping, which included the long-running Mother Goose series of illustrations and also the creation of all of the Good Housekeeping covers from December 1917 to 1933. Among the more than 60 books that Smith illustrated were Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses.