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1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith
1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith

1910 Rare First Edition - A Child’s Book of Old Verses by Jessie Willcox Smith

$200 USD - $200 USD
$200 USD
$200 USD - $200 USD
$200 USD

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A handsome First Edition, First Printing of Jessie Willcox Smith’s beloved anthology of childhood verse, complete with all ten colour plates, pictorial endpapers, and its wonderfully preserved original pictorial cloth binding.

Author: Various authors; selected and illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith.
Title: A Child’s Book of Old Verses.
Publisher: New York: Duffield & Company, 1910.
Edition: First Edition, First Printing. Nudelman A30.
Language: English.
Pages: ix, 124 pages.
Size: 9.5 x 7 inches.
Binding: Very good original dark blue publisher’s cloth, lettered in gilt to the front board and spine, with a large mounted colour illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith to the upper cover within a gilt and blind-stamped frame. The pictorial onlay shows the characteristic light rubbing and surface wear visible in the photographs, while the cloth remains particularly fresh and well preserved with only minor wear to the extremities. Top edge gilt; fore and lower edges untrimmed. Protected in a removable mylar cover. 
Content: Very good, clean and well-preserved content on heavy quality paper. Complete. Original pictorial endpapers printed in blue with Smith’s repeating image of a little girl with a hoop. Contemporary ownership inscription to the upper corner of the front free endpaper.
Illustrations: Complete with ten full-page colour plates by Jessie Willcox Smith, including the frontispiece A Child’s Grace, together with numerous charming black-and-white illustrations and decorative headpieces throughout the text. The colour plates retain strong, attractive colour and are accompanied by their original captioned tissue guards.

Estimate: $250–325 USD.

The book:

A Child’s Book of Old Verses gathers a wonderfully varied selection of poems, nursery rhymes and songs for children, chosen by Jessie Willcox Smith from writers including William Shakespeare, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alfred Tennyson, George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, William Makepeace Thackeray, Jane and Ann Taylor, and many traditional or anonymous sources. Familiar pieces such as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, Sweet and Low, How Doth the Little Busy Bee and Away in a Manger appear alongside less frequently encountered Victorian childhood verse.

First published by Duffield in 1910, this is the First Edition, First Printing, identified as Nudelman A30. Its generous format, gilt top edge, pictorial endpapers, colour cover onlay and ten full-page colour illustrations make it one of Smith’s particularly attractive early twentieth-century gift books. Complete copies retaining all ten plates are increasingly desirable.

The illustrator:

Jessie Willcox Smith (1863–1935) was one of the leading American illustrators of the Golden Age of Illustration. A pupil of Howard Pyle and a member of the celebrated group of women artists later known as the Red Rose Girls, she became especially renowned for her sympathetic and remarkably natural portrayals of childhood. Her work appeared in major magazines, advertisements and numerous books, including editions of Little Women, A Child’s Garden of Verses and The Water-Babies.

Smith’s children are distinguished by their warmth, individuality and lack of sentimentality. In A Child’s Book of Old Verses, the ten colour plates range from intimate domestic scenes to playful encounters with animals and the seaside, while her smaller black-and-white drawings weave through the poetry itself. The result is a particularly successful marriage of text, typography and illustration characteristic of Smith at the height of her career.