Chelsea Bindery
Our latest Chelsea Bindery catalogue brings together old and new favourites, including A Bear Called Paddington, Tarzan of the Apes, and Tender Is the Night. Among the new designs are striking bindings of Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile and the first Hardy Boys book, The Tower Treasure, featuring intricate wraparound leather onlays inspired by their original dust jackets.
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KIPLING, Rudyard. The Jungle Book; The Second Jungle Book.London : 1894 & 1895
First editions. Based on folk tales and legends that Kipling learned during his childhood in India, The Jungle Book was first published in periodicals in 1893-4, before it was printed in book form in 1894. An immediate success on publication, the book was reprinted twice the same year, and twice again in 1895.
Kipling won the Nobel Prize in... Learn More -
HARDY, Thomas. Jude the Obscure.London : 1896
First edition in book form, this copy entirely in the first state (pagination to all partially blank pages in signature A-H).
Jude the Obscure was Hardy's last novel, in which he "deliberately [attacked] the existing educational system and marriage laws. The novel's sexual directness fuelled the hostility of its reception in some quarters,... Learn More -
ROBINSON, Charles (illus.); STEVENSON, Robert Louis. A Child's Garden of Verses.London : 1896
First Charles Robinson edition, originally published in 1885. Learn More -
GILES, Herbert A. (trans.). Chinese Poetry in English Verse.London : 1898
First edition of this poetry anthology that influenced several members of the Bloomsbury Group. According to Lytton Strachey, the lyrics "look back upon love through a long vista of years which have smoothed away the agitations of romance and have brought with them the calm familiarity of happiness, or the quiet desolation of regret" (Holroyd... Learn More -
AUSTEN, Jane. Emma.London : 1898
First Hammond edition. Christine "Chris" Hammond was one of the most productive illustrators of the 1890s, interpreting works by Thackeray, Gaskell, and Eliot.
She was "an ideal illustrator for Jane Austen" (Cooke) and also illustrated Sense and Sensibility. Hammond drew Austen's characters with an eye to "small nuances of facial... Learn More -
CHURCHILL, Winston S. London to Ladysmith via Pretoria.London : 1900
First edition of Churchill's account of his experiences as a war correspondent in the Second Boer War; "a splendid book both aesthetically and from a literary standpoint, the Ladysmith is one of the most sought-after titles in the canon" (Langworth).
"The volume essentially consists of 27 letters and telegrams to the Morning Post written... Learn More -
CHURCHILL, Winston S. Ian Hamilton's March.London : 1900
First edition, first impression, first issue. Ian Hamilton's March is a sequel to London to Ladysmith and completes Churchill's coverage of the Boer War, describing the liberation of the Boer prison camp where Churchill had been held captive and the march of Ian Hamilton's mounted division from Bloemfontein to Johannesburg.
"The volume... Learn More -
KIPLING, Rudyard. Just So Stories.London : 1902
First edition, of Kipling's famous collection of 12 stories and 12 poems including "How the Camel Got His Hump" and "How the Leopard Got His Spots". "The stories, told with Kipling's oratorical diction and whimsical humour, clearly increase in complexity as the book progresses" (Grolier). Learn More -
LONDON, Jack. The Call of the Wild.New York : 1903
First edition of this classic of childhood literature, set in the Klondike Gold Rush and inspired by Egerton Ryerson Young's book My Dogs in the Northland, published the previous year. Learn More -
SAPPHO; CARMAN, Bliss. Sappho, One Hundred Lyrics.Boston : 1904
First edition, number 120 of 500 copies. Sappho, One Hundred Lyrics was the first comprehensive and fully imagined rendering into English of the fragmentary poems of Sappho.
In 1902 Mitchell Kennerley gave Carman a copy of H. T. Wharton's Sappho (1885) and suggested that he poeticise Wharton's more literal translations. Inspired by Wharton... Learn More -
RACKHAM, Arthur (illus.); IRVING, Washington. Rip Van Winkle.London : 1905
First Rackham edition, most handsomely bound. The illustrations immediately established Rackham as the leading illustrator of lavishly produced gift books in the Edwardian era. In March 1905 the original watercolours were exhibited at Leicester Galleries, attracting the attention of J. M. Barrie, who then commissioned Rackham's next book, Peter... Learn More -
RACKHAM, Arthur (illus.); SHAKESPEARE, William. A Midsummer-Night's Dream.London : 1908
Signed limited edition, number 17 of 1,000 numbered copies signed by the artist. In these memorable illustrations, Rackham "developed his gift for drawing witches, gnomes, fairies, and anthropomorphized trees and brought them to a pitch of vivid characterization, sometimes with an unsettling frisson of horror" (ODNB). Learn More -
RACKHAM, Arthur (illus.); GRIMM, Brothers. Grimm's Fairy Tales.London : 1909
First Rackham edition. This is a revised and enlarged edition of the work originally published in 1900, with some new illustrations, as well as others redrawn and coloured.
As noted by Rodney Engen, "Rackham greatly loved fairy tales and had collected his many favourites over the years. The Brothers Grimm held a special place in his... Learn More -
RACKHAM, Arthur (illus.); GRIMM, Brothers. Grimm's Fairy Tales.London : 1909
Signed limited edition, number 457 of 750 copies signed by the artist. This is a revised and enlarged edition of the work originally published in 1900, with some new illustrations, as well as others redrawn and coloured.
As noted by Rodney Engen, "Rackham greatly loved fairy tales and had collected his many favourites over the years. The... Learn More -
RACKHAM, Arthur (illus.); SWIFT, Jonathan. Gulliver's TravelsLondon : 1909
Signed limited edition, number 695 of 750 copies signed by the artist.
Rackham first illustrated Swift's satire in 1900 (published with a colour frontispiece and 11 black and white drawings). Rackham reworked the drawings for a new edition in 1909, adding colour. The signed limited edition includes an additional colour plate, "The... Learn More -
DULAC, Edmund (illus.); QUILLER-COUCH, Sir Arthur. The Sleeping Beauty and other Fairy Tales.London : [1910]
First edition, deluxe limited issue, number 47 of 1,000 copies signed by the artist.
Regarded by Gordon Ray as Dulac's best work, the deluxe issue of The Sleeping Beauty sold out on publication. The artist "found inspiration for his fairy tale characters' dress and surroundings in the French 18th century... when the literature he... Learn More -
FORSTER, E. M. Howards End.London : 1910
First edition. A social novel exploring class, gender, sexuality, and nationality in early 20th-century Britain, it is considered one of the author's best works and "the one which firmly established his reputation among his contemporaries as an important writer" (Lodge, p. ix).
Howards End is known especially for its epigraph "Only... Learn More -
BURNETT, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden.London : 1911
First edition in book-form. The Secret Garden was first serialized, starting in autumn 1910, in The American Magazine, a publication aimed at adults.
The entire novel was first published in the present book-form in the summer of 1911 by Heinemann in London, and simultaneously in the US by M. B. Kork. The US edition was illustrated by M. B.... Learn More -
RACKHAM, Arthur (illus.); AESOP. Aesop's Fables.London : 1912
First Rackham edition, signed limited issue, and first edition of this translation; number 1,191 of 1,450 copies signed by the artist.
"The peculiar secret of Rackham's success in seizing upon the essence of the human and portraying it in animal form, which is after all the basic device of the morality, is unwittingly touched upon in... Learn More -
RACKHAM, Arthur. Mother Goose.London : 1913
Signed limited edition, number 846 of 1,130 copies signed by the artist, presented here in a handsome binding by the Chelsea Bindery.
One contemporary reviewer noted that if Rackham's "present series of drawings illustrating Mother Goose had come before the public unheralded by the many successes he has already achieved, he would again have... Learn More
