About this Item
Hello Brer Rabbit (Brer Rabbit?s Adventures). Stories from the Uncle Remus tradition of Joel Chandler Harris. Illustrated throughout in colour by Rene Cloke. London: Award Publications Limited. Copyright 1985 by Award Publications Limited. This edition first published 1993; second impression 1994. ISBN 0-86163-692-9 / 9780861636921. Printed in Singapore.
Hardcover pictorial boards, no dust jacket as issued. Soft pink mottled boards with gilt-red title lettering and a colour plate on the upper cover showing Brer Rabbit in check trousers and red scarf, Brer Terrapin, a hedgehog with a flag, and other woodland creatures. Matching illustrated endpapers crowded with rabbits, foxes, squirrels, a tortoise and a well scene. Approximately 24 pages. Small quarto picture-book format.
Contents include several self-contained Brer Rabbit tales, among them The Great Race (Brer Rabbit and Brer Terrapin), Brer Fox Goes Hunting, How Brer Rabbit Lost His Tail, and Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear. The text is a clear modern English retelling for children rather than Harris?s original dialect. The moral-comedy of the trickster rabbit is intact: races won by cunning, bags of game stolen by playing dead, a frozen tail snapped off in the river, and a garden trap sprung by Brer Bear?s curiosity.
Condition: very good. Boards clean and bright; corners sharp; spine uncreased; pages unmarked, with no names, inscriptions, tears or foxing. Binding tight. A well-preserved copy of this 1994 Award impression.
Author
Joel Chandler Harris (1848?1908) was an American journalist and folklorist from Eatonton, Georgia. Working on the Atlanta Constitution, he collected African American animal trickster tales told on Southern plantations and recast them as the Uncle Remus stories, first gathered in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880). Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer Bear and Brer Terrapin became the best-known American folk animals of the late nineteenth century. Harris?s versions mixed oral tradition with a framed plantation narrator; later children?s publishers, including Award, issued shortened, illustrated retellings that dropped dialect and the Remus frame while keeping the plots. This volume belongs to that mid-to-late twentieth-century picture-book line.
Illustrator
Rene Cloke (born Irene Mabel N. Cloke, Plymouth, 1904?1995) was a British children?s illustrator and greetings-card artist. After training and early commercial work she spent the Second World War as a War Office tracer, drawing maps from aerial photographs for the RAF. After the war she illustrated fairy tales, Blyton titles, Bible stories and a long run of Award Publications picture books. Her Brer Rabbit work for Award in the 1980s and 1990s is among her most distinctive later output: anthropomorphic animals in neat Edwardian-style clothes, English hedgerow plants (rose hips, forget-me-nots, toadstools), red squirrels and garden birds rather than Deep South fauna. Faces often appear in tree bark. The palette is soft watercolour with clear outlines, closer to mid-century British gift-book art than to Kemble or A. B. Frost?s original Uncle Remus drawings. Cloke also illustrated Brer Rabbit Stories, More Brer Rabbit Stories, My Big Book of Brer Rabbit Stories and later Award omnibuses that still use her plates.
Publisher note
A complete, attractive copy of a popular Cloke?Harris picture book, suitable for collectors of British illustrated children?s books, Award Publications, or Brer Rabbit in colour.
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