1942 First Edition with Dust Jacket - Dorcas Porkus Illustrated by Tasha Tudor

The scarce 1942 first edition of Tasha Tudor’s charming early “Calico Book,” preserved in its original illustrated dust jacket with the 75-cent price intact.

Author: Tasha Tudor.
Title: Dorcas Porkus.
Publisher: New York, Oxford University Press, 1942.
Edition: First Edition, First Printing.
Language: English.
Pages: Unpaginated.
Size: 4.5" x 4".
Binding: Very good original yellow cloth patterned with white polka dots, with blue-lettered title panel to the front board. Binding remains bright, tight, and sound, with light rubbing and wear to the extremities. In the scarce original pictorial dust jacket, Good, with general toning and soiling, rubbing, creasing, small chips and closed tears along the edges and spine extremities, as shown. The original $0.75 price remains unclipped on the front flap. Protected in a removable mylar cover. 
Content: Very good. Internally clean, sound, and well preserved, with only light age-toning and occasional minor marks. The illustrated “This Book Belongs to” panel remains unused, with no ownership inscription noted. Calligraphy by Hilda Scott.
Illustrations: Delightfully illustrated throughout in colour by Tasha Tudor, with full-page and vignette illustrations, decorative pictorial initials, illustrated title page, and pictorial endpapers.
Estimate: USD 250–350.

The book:
Published in 1942, Dorcas Porkus is one of Tasha Tudor’s earliest picture books and one of the diminutive volumes issued by Oxford University Press as the “Calico Books.” The story follows Dorcas, an unusually well-mannered little pig belonging to Tom and Sylvie Ann, whose attempted bath on the day of a quilting party produces predictably comic and disastrous consequences. Tudor’s affectionate portrayal of farm life, children, animals, gardens, and domestic interiors already displays the nostalgic rural world that would become inseparable from her work.

Particularly desirable here is the survival of the original pictorial dust jacket with its 75-cent price intact. Early Tudor books are frequently encountered without their jackets, and the combination of the bright yellow polka-dot binding, charming colour illustrations, hand-lettered text, and original jacket makes this a particularly appealing example for collectors of Tasha Tudor and twentieth-century illustrated children’s books. 

The author:
Tasha Tudor (1915–2008) was an American illustrator and author whose distinctive watercolours and carefully observed scenes of traditional rural life made her one of the most recognizable children’s-book artists of the twentieth century. Dorcas Porkus, published only a few years after her first book, belongs to the formative period of her career; her official bibliography places it among her earliest commercially published works, preceding such later classics as Mother Goose and A Child’s Garden of Verses.

Tudor eventually illustrated nearly one hundred books and developed an artistic world of gardens, old houses, children, corgis, farm animals, and nineteenth-century domestic life. The intimacy and humour already evident in Dorcas Porkus make these early miniature books especially appealing to collectors, while examples retaining their original dust jackets have become increasingly difficult to find.