At the Back of the North Wind (Books of Wonder)

George MacDonald's best-known fantasy has enchanted generations of children and adults since it was first published in London over a century ago. Considered to be a landmark in the development of the children's novel, this enthralling fairy tale is just as endearing today.

Modern readers will thrill to the story of little Diamond and the tall, majestic North Wind-the lady whose dark eyes blazed and whose glistening black hair streamed around behind her. They and their fantastic tale are vividly portrayed in eight full-color paintings by Jessie Willcox Smith, one of America's most beloved illustrators.

This facsimile of the rare 1919 edition is sure to be treasured by young and old alike.

George MacDonald (1824-1905) was a popular Scottish lecturer and writer of novels, poetry, and fairy tales. Born in Aberdeenshire, he was briefly a clergyman, then a professor of English literature at Bedford and King's College in London. W. H. Auden called him "one of the most remarkable writers of the nineteenth century."

Jessie Willcox Smith (1863-1935) was one of the most popular and successful American illustrators of the early twentieth century. A student at Howard Pyle's Brandywine School of American Illustration, her hundreds of magazine illustrations and more than forty illustrated books include Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses (1905), Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (1916), and George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind (1919) and The Princess and the Goblin (1920).

Peter Glassman is the owner of Books of Wonder, the New York City bookstore and publisher specializing in new and old imaginative books for children. He is also the editor of the Books of Wonder Classics, a series of deluxe facsimiles and newly illustrated editions of timeless tales. And he is the author of The Wizard Next Door, illustrated by Steven Kellogg. Mr. Glassman lives in New York City.