THE SLY OLD CAT

London and New York: Frederick Warne, (1971). Original white cloth pictorially decorated in color, with matching dust jacket. First Edition, published 28 years after the author / illustrator's death. The Foreword by Leslie Linder explains that Potter wrote this in 1906, and the plan was for it to be a third title in panoramic (or concertina) form -- after FIERCE BAD RABBIT and MISS MOPPET. But the booksellers complained that they were having trouble re-folding those books after people perused them, and SLY OLD CAT was put off numerous times over the subsequent years. It involves a cat who invites a rat to a tea-party -- the latter of whom fears he might be intended as dessert. This is a fine copy in a fine jacket. See Linder p. 434 (SLY OLD CAT was published in the same year as the Linder bibliography).