1912 Rare First Edition - Bill the Minder illustrated by W. Heath Robinson

The first American edition of W. Heath Robinson’s wonderfully eccentric Bill the Minder, lavishly illustrated by the author with sixteen mounted colour plates and a profusion of his fantastical black-and-white drawings.

Author: W. Heath Robinson.
Title: Bill the Minder.
Publisher: New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1912.
Edition: First American Edition.
Language: English.
Pages: xiv, 254 pages.
Size: 10 x 7 inches.
Binding: Very good original publisher’s green cloth binding, elaborately decorated and lettered in gilt to the front board and spine, with the original mounted colour illustration to the front cover. Light rubbing and wear to the cloth margins and extremities, with the gilt remaining attractive and the pictorial label well preserved, as shown. Protected in a removable mylar cover. 
Content: Very good content, complete and firmly bound. Some age toning and foxing, chiefly affecting the outer margins of the preliminary leaves and occasionally elsewhere, as shown. Contemporary Christmas 1912 gift inscription to the front free endpaper.
Illustrations: Illustrated throughout by W. Heath Robinson with a colour frontispiece and fifteen further mounted colour plates, many retaining their captioned tissue guards, together with numerous full-page and smaller black-and-white illustrations, decorative title pages, headpieces, tailpieces and vignettes. Complete.

Estimate: US$275–375.

The book: Bill the Minder is one of Heath Robinson’s most inventive books for children, combining sixteen interconnected comic tales with the elaborate visual imagination for which he became famous. The adventures begin with Bill, who becomes minder to an unruly collection of children, and expand into encounters with the King of Troy, the Ancient Mariner, mer-children, soldiers, musicians, merchants and a succession of wonderfully improbable characters. Robinson both wrote and illustrated the book, giving the whole production an unusually unified and personal character.

Published in 1912, this first American edition reproduces the lavish format of the British first trade edition, including sixteen mounted colour plates and the extensive suite of black-and-white illustrations. Complete copies retaining the colour plates, tissue guards and original pictorial cloth are increasingly desirable, particularly when the binding remains as fresh and attractive as here.

The author and illustrator: William Heath Robinson (1872–1944) was an English illustrator, cartoonist and author whose name became synonymous in Britain with absurdly elaborate mechanical contraptions designed to accomplish simple tasks. Before that expression entered everyday language, however, Robinson had already established himself as one of the outstanding illustrators of the Golden Age of book illustration, producing work for Shakespeare, Rabelais, Kipling and numerous children’s classics.

In Bill the Minder, his humour is given particularly free rein. The colour plates display the delicacy and fantasy of his storybook work, while the abundant pen-and-ink drawings reveal the intricate architectural detail, comic invention and slightly surreal imagination that make Robinson’s illustrated books so distinctive.