Sleeping Beauty (Signed limited edition)

First American edition, limited to 625 copies. Large Quarto (11 3/8 x 8 7/8 inches; 289 x 226 mm.). 110, [1, imprint], [1, blank] pp. With an additional color silhouette drawing not found in the trade edition. Color frontispiece mounted on white paper with decorative border, three double-page silhouette drawings with color, two full-page silhouette drawings with color, eight single-page silhouette drawings in black and white and forty-one silhouette drawings in the text. Very light offsetting from illustrations onto facing pages. Publisher's quarter vellum over parchment boards, front cover pictorially decorated and lettered in gilt, spine lettered in gilt, pictorial end-papers printed in green, top edge gilt, others uncut. Spine very slightly darkened, corners a little rubbed, most noticeably at lower corner of front board. Overall a Very Good copy of this hard to find title, the offsetting far less prominent than is usually seen with this title. For Rackham, "The immediate aftermath of the war brought Some British Ballads (1919), and.Cinderella (1919) and The Sleeping Beauty (1920), retold by C.S. Evans, in which his gift for silhouette was given full play." (Hudson, Arthur Rackham: His Life and Work, p. 108). Rackham's lovely illustrations provide a sense of escapism and romance to a world emerging from the darkness of the war. Arthur Rackham (1867 - 1939) is perhaps the most acclaimed and influential illustrator of the Golden Age of Illustration. A prolific artist even from his youth, Rackham got his start as an illustrator working for the Westminster Budget Newspaper in 1892. Over the next few years, he took on more and more commissions for children's books, hitting his career high in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Rackham turned his imaginative pen to every classic - from Shakespeare to Dickens to Poe. Riall, p. 141; Latimore and Haskell, pp. 51-52. Very Good +.…