The First Book, Song and Story for Little Children. This item is unavailable.The First Book, Song and Story for Little Children

A scarce anthology of rhymes and tales for the young, with countless illustrations. An extremely scarce work, here in its first edition. Numerous illustrators contributed work to this collection, providing full plate and vignette illustrations, including landscape and marine painter Alic Carruthers Gould, Violet Holdsworth and Helen Stratton.Edited by Ernest Edwin Speight, an English Literature professor who spent forty years working at the Imperial University, Tokyo, and Osmania University in India, while simultaneously writing fiction and poetry. The anthology is co-edited by Clara Linklater Thompson, who also contributed a number of stories to the volume. Amongst the other sources present are poets John Keats and Matthew Arnold, alongside various Breton, Finnish and Norwegian folk tales.An advert to a further work in this series is featured to the verso of a front endpaper.Bearing a contemporary gift inscription dated November 7th 1906. In the publisher's original cloth binding, with some marks to the boards and fading to the spine. Shelf wear to spine head and tail. Front and rear hinges a little tender but holding firm. Contemporary inscription to front free endpaper. Internally, generally firmly bound. Closed tear to the tail of one page. Pages generally clean and bright, with the odd mark. Good. …