Presented by Pom Harrington, owner of Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Small quarto. Specially bound for the publisher by Sangorski & Sutcliffe in red crushed morocco, spine gilt tooled with a fish motif (closely resembling that used on copies in the vellum binding), concentric gilt panels on sides with fish motif at corners, top edge gilt, others untrimmed, three-line gilt turn-ins, marbled endpapers. Housed in a red quarter morocco slipcase. Colour frontispiece and 11 coloured plates with captioned tissue guards, black and white illustrations in the text, by Rackham. Attractive bookplate of Cyril Sturla (a captain in The Cheshire Regiment during the Great War). An excellent copy.
Deluxe edition, number 1 of 757 copies signed by the artist; this is one of a putative 10 “special copies” in a luxury binding commissioned by the publisher and containing an original signed pen-and-ink and watercolour sketch by Rackham (this one captioned “Handle him as if you loved him” – Walton’s dictum for handling a live frog before impaling it on a hook) and showing an amusing riparian scene with a frog pleading with a gentleman, while a typically Rackhamesque anthropomorphic tree looks on. It was George Harrap who hit on the idea of a “Rackham special”, the most exclusive format of Rackham’s books. From The Vicar of Wakefield on, Harrap held back the first dozen or so copies to be specially bound, as here, and asked Rackham to add a unique original watercolour sketch to the limited page. The first few copies were usually reserved for the publisher and his family; only a handful were available to the public. Describing his artistic method for these “specials”, Rackham pointed out that “my little sketches must inevitably be of a light hearted or joking nature… They have to be spontaneous and free handed. The nature of the paper is such that there can be no preparatory drawing and no alterations”.
