This book is a stunner. It has 16 magnificent color plate illustration by the amazing Kay Nielsen, and numerous smaller pen-and-ink illustrations both in the stories and separating the stories. Pages with text have a beautiful art nouveau border drawn by Nielsen at the top of each page. The detail and care put into the design of this book is amazing and the results are exquisite.
The wonderful condition of this book (see below) and its rarity would make it a very special gift. (And giving yourself a gift is always a consideration!) You can not go wrong when Kay Nielsen's work is involved, especially in such profusion.
BOOK CONDITION
The purple cloth cover shows some dark smudges around the top of the cover, in the area of the title, although they are not that apparent. The tips show bumping and rubbing, as does the spine. The top of the spine is lightened and is softened, because this book was pulled off of the shelf and admired a lot by a previous owner. This book is 6.25 x 9.25 inches and 244 pages long.
The interior has a ownership plate with a gift inscription inside the front cover. It is pasted over the endpaper design, but the ownership plate itself is is amazingly cute that it can hardly be considered a flaw -- it is an illustration of a little girl with a Louise Brooks black bob haircut reading a book as she sits in front of a large bookshelf. As noted above, the gift inscription is dated 1929.
The interior pages are very clean with just a bit of age-related tanning. The color plate pages are in excellent condition. There are no other marks, rips or tears. This book was very carefully handled. The only flaw is that the binding is a bit cracked between pages 130 and 131.
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