1459200 1955 Eleanor Farjeon. The Little Bookroom.

 

Farjeon, Eleanor; Ardizzone, Edward (illustrator).  The Little Bookroom: Eleanor Farjeon's Short Stories for Children Chosen by Herself.  (London): Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, 1955. Octavo, original orange cloth, spine lettered in gilt, original unclipped color pictorial dust jacket designed by Ardizzone. Illustrated title page and thirty-six line drawings throughout text. Light edgewear to jacket, with one small chip.  First edition of Eleanor Farjeon’s celebrated storybook, winner of the Carnegie Medal for the best children’s book by a British subject. Farjeon was inspired by her experience growing up in a house surrounded by literature: In the home of my childhood there was a room we called ‘The Little Bookroom.’ True, every room in the house could have been called a bookroom. Our nurseries upstairs were full of books. Downstairs my father’s study was full of them. They lined the dining-room walls, and overflowed into my mother’s sitting-room, and up into the bedrooms. It would have been more natural to live without clothes than without books. As unnatural not to read as not to eat. Sometimes comic, sometimes bittersweet, the stories in this collection are ideal for reading aloud, ranging from original fairy tales like The King’s Daughter Cries for the Moon and The Clumber Pup to modern fables like The Connemara Donkey and San Fairy Ann. The sympathetic illustrations are by Edward Ardizzone: both the author and the illustrator feel that they contain some of the best book illustrations he has yet done. In 1956, the year after The Little Bookroom appeared, Farjeon was awarded the first Hans Christian Andersen Medal, the highest international award in the field of children’s literature. A near-fine copy of a classic.