Aesop's Fables (Deluxe Illustrated Edition, Limited & Signed by Arthur Rackham)

AESOP (trans. V. S. Vernon Jones; intro. G. K. Chesterton; illus. Arthur Rackham). Aesop's Fables: A New Translation. London: William Heinemann; New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1912.

Quarto (29.5 cm). Original publisher's white buckram cloth. Gilt-stamped vignettes and titling to upper board and spine. Top edge gilt; others uncut. xxix, 224 pp. 13 tipped-in colour plates on thick brown art paper with captioned tissue guards; frontispiece, illustrated title page, and 53 black and white illustrations throughout, comprising 19 full-page illustrations and numerous in-text vignettes. First edition. Signed limited deluxe edition. Limited to 1,450 numbered and signed copies, of which 1,000 were for Great Britain and Ireland, 250 for the United States of America, and 200 for Australia; this being copy 266. Signed by Arthur Rackham in black ink on the limitation page.

Arthur Rackham (1867–1939) is the central figure of the golden age of British illustration — that period between approximately 1890 and the First World War when a confluence of advances in colour printing technology, expanding middle-class prosperity, and a generation of genuinely extraordinary artistic talent produced illustrated books of a quality that has never been surpassed in the English-language tradition. His career began in pen and ink for the illustrated press, developed through the early gift books of the 1890s, and reached its full characteristic expression with the extraordinary sequence of Heinemann illustrated gift books that defined his reputation: Rip Van Winkle (1905), Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1907), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1908), the Wagnerian Rhinegold and the Valkyrie (1910) and Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods (1911), and this volume, Aesop's Fables, in 1912.

The Rackham of the Heinemann gift books is a distinct and identifiable sensibility. His watercolour plates carry a palette of autumnal browns, ochres, and dull greens, overlaid with the pen lines that give his figures their characteristic weight and texture; the human and animal inhabitants of his pages exist in a world that is simultaneously familiar and uncanny, in which the English countryside is never entirely safe, where gnarled trees become faces and undergrowth conceals presences that have not been fully named. His technique — watercolour over pen and ink, with a level of linear detail that rewards extended looking — was perfectly suited to the Heinemann chromolithographic process, which reproduced his colour plates with a fidelity unavailable to earlier technology. The peculiar secret of Rackham's success in seizing upon the essence of the human and portraying it in animal form, which is after all the basic device of the morality, is unwittingly touched upon in Chesterton's delightful introduction to the 1912 edition.

The translation of this edition is by V. S. Vernon Jones, whose rendering of the Aesopic tradition into clear, idiomatic English prose was the standard English version for decades. The introduction is by G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) — essayist, novelist, theologian, and one of the most acute literary minds of his generation — who brings to Aesop the same paradoxical intelligence he brought to everything. The fables themselves, attributed to the Greek slave Aesop and surviving in various compilations from antiquity through the medieval period, are among the oldest surviving narratives in the Western tradition: brief moral tales in which animals speak, act, and suffer with a clarity about human motivation that their simplicity makes only more devastating. The Fox and the Grapes, the Hare and the Tortoise, the Boy who Cried Wolf, the Ant and the Grasshopper — these are stories that have been in continuous circulation for twenty-six centuries, and Rackham's illustrations give them a visual form as enduring as the stories themselves.

The limitation of this edition is of particular note. Of the 1,450 numbered and signed copies, Heinemann reserved 200 specifically for the Australian market — a relatively large allocation that reflects both the vigour of the colonial book trade and the already substantial reputation Rackham had established in the antipodean market before the First World War. The limitation page is signed by Rackham in black ink.

Very good. Covers marked and somewhat soiled. Spine darkened with a bump near the middle. Binding sound: square and tight. Contents very good; some markings and toning throughout, most prominent to preliminaries and to pages succeeding the plate mounts. Plates fine, bright and bold, excellently preserved.

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Catalogue Number: HH000435