Presented by Ben Houston of Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Octavo. Original green cloth, titles to spine in silver. With the pictorial dust jacket. Housed in a green quarter morocco solander box by the Chelsea Bindery.
First edition, first impression. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the first blank, “Elisabet Neumann, with kind regards from C. S. Lewis, 26/10/50”. Extremely rare: Lewis was an infrequent presenter of books, and, although signed copies have occasionally appeared on the market, we are aware of no other presentation copy of this first published title in the Narnia series ever appearing in commerce.
The inscription is dated ten days after first publication, which was 16 October 1950. We know that Lewis was in Magdalen College, Oxford, on the day of presentation, Thursday, 26 October 1950, as it happened to be the same day that he wrote the first of his Letters to An American Lady (published in 1967).
