1922 Rare First Edition - Hawthorne's Wonder Book illustrated by Arthur Rackham

A handsome and complete first Rackham edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s celebrated retelling of the Greek myths, richly illustrated with twenty-four colour plates and Rackham’s wonderfully inventive black-and-white drawings, in the original red gilt-decorated cloth.

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Title: A Wonder Book.
Illustrator: Arthur Rackham.
Publisher: London, New York & Toronto: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., no date [1922].
Edition: First Edition thus; first trade edition illustrated by Arthur Rackham. The Rackham edition was issued in 1922, alongside a signed limited edition of 600 copies. 
Language: English.
Pages: viii, 206 pages.
Size: 10 x 7 inches.
Binding: Very good, near fine original publisher’s red cloth binding, with the title blind-stamped to the upper board above an attractive gilt design after Rackham depicting the figures from the book, and gilt lettering to the spine. Light rubbing, but the cloth remains notably bright and the gilt decoration strong and attractive, as shown. Binding firm and sound. Protected in a removable mylar cover.
Content: Very good content, complete, clean and firmly bound. Pages show gentle age toning with only occasional minor spotting and handling marks, as shown. No significant inscriptions or markings apparent. The illustrated endpapers, plates and text illustrations are all very well preserved.
Illustrations: Complete with 24 full-page colour illustrations by Arthur Rackham, sixteen of them mounted on cream paper and originally accompanied by captioned tissue guards, together with 20 black-and-white drawings, decorative headpieces, initials, title-page vignette and pictorial endpapers. 

Estimate: US$400–500.

The book: First published in 1851 as A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, Hawthorne’s collection transforms six classical myths into stories intended for young readers. The tales include The Gorgon’s Head, The Golden Touch, The Paradise of Children, The Three Golden Apples, The Miraculous Pitcher, and The Chimæra. Hawthorne frames the myths as stories told by the young Eustace Bright to a group of children at Tanglewood in the Berkshire Hills, giving the ancient narratives a distinctly nineteenth-century American setting.

This 1922 edition is one of the most desirable illustrated versions of the book. Rackham approached Hawthorne’s mythology with his characteristic mixture of delicacy, grotesquerie and fantasy: trees acquire faces, supernatural beings inhabit tangled landscapes, and the ancient gods and monsters become inhabitants of the same dreamlike world that made his editions of Peter Pan, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Brothers Grimm so celebrated. The handsome red-and-gilt publisher’s binding was created specifically for the trade edition. 

The author: Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) was one of the major figures of nineteenth-century American literature, best known for The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and his short fiction. In A Wonder-Book, Hawthorne deliberately reshaped classical mythology for children, treating the ancient stories not as fixed archaeological relics but as imaginative tales capable of continual retelling.

The illustrator: Arthur Rackham (1867–1939) was one of the foremost illustrators of the Golden Age of British book illustration. His instantly recognizable combination of sinuous line, muted colour and fantastical character design made him particularly suited to fairy tales, folklore and mythology. A Wonder Book appeared relatively late in his career and displays both sides of his art particularly well: the intricate pen-and-ink fantasy of the text illustrations and the atmospheric, often dramatic colour work of the full-page plates.