Books

First edition, first impression, of Milne's first collection of stories featuring the famous bear. The dust jacket is in the first state ("117th Thousand" on rear flap). After the huge success of When We Were Very Young in 1924, Milne was asked to contribute a story to the London Evening News. "The Wrong Sort of Bees", published on Christmas Eve 1925, was based on a bedtime sto165402ry that Milne had told his son Christopher. It starred Christopher's teddy bear, bought at Harrods for Christopher's first birthday, known initially as Edward or Edward Bear and later renamed Winnie-the-Pooh (after a favourite bear cub at London zoo). Winnie-the-Pooh was an immediate success and garnered even more enthusiastic reviews than its predecessor, and one critic wrote that "When the real Christopher Robin is a little old man, children will find him waiting for them. It is the child's book of the season that seems certain to stay" (Thwaite, p. 317). The volume contains "the adventures in the forest of Christopher Robin's Teddy Bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, with his companions of the nursery - Piglet, the old grey donkey Ee-yore, Kanga and Baby Roo, Owl, Rabbit, all Rabbit's friends and relations, and, of course, Christopher Robin too; together with some of the poems which the Pooh Bear made up and sang to himself as he went along" (jacket blurb). Octavo. Original green cloth, spine lettered in gilt, front cover with vignette and ruled border in gilt, yellow endpapers, top edge gilt. With dust jacket. Illustrated throughout by E. H. Shepard. Gilt bright, spine ends and one corner lightly bumped, minor browning and bubbling to endpapers, a few spots of foxing to edges; jacket spine panel toned, shallow chips and short closed tears at spine ends and corners repaired with tape on verso, without price as issued: a very good copy in like jacket. Payne IIA. Ann Thwaite, A. A. Milne: His Life, 1990.

Winnie-the-Pooh, also called Pooh Bear, is a fictional anthropomorphic teddy bear created by English author A.A. Milne. The first collection of stories about the character was the book 'Winnie-the-Pooh' (1926), and this was followed by 'The House at Pooh Corner' (1928). Milne also included a poem about the bear in the children's verse book 'When We Were Very Young' (1924) and many more in 'Now We Are Six' (1927). All four volumes were illustrated by E.H. Shepard.