Books

2012 First Thus. Fine Hardback. No inscriptions or bookplates. Fine solander box. Limited Edition of 1000 copies, each including a numbered signed print by the artist Niroot Puttapipat. This one is number 314. Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories are among the most inventive and original of all children's fiction. Posing ingenious explanations of how animals acquired their characteristics and revelling in exuberant wordplay, they are the work of a master storyteller. Kipling began inventing stories about how leopards got their spots and camels their humps to entertain his children in particular his eldest daughter, Josephine, who died in 1899 aged six. When he wrote down the stories for publication in 1902, he remembered her with the phrase 'Best Beloved'. This special limited edition includes all 12 iconic tales, as well as 'The Tabu Tale', whose excitable heroine, Taffy, is based on Josephine. In 'The Beginning of the Armadilloes', an unlikely alliance between a hedgehog and a tortoise leads to a new species. The Elephant's Child, full of ''satiable curtiosity', travels to the 'great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River' to find out what the Crocodile eats for dinner, and inadvertently returns home with a useful extension to his nose. In the course of these delightful fables,Kipling accommodates magic, God and natural selection from the 'Eldest Magician' who got the Earth ready, to the Leopard who changes his fur to hide in the forest full of 'patchy-blatchy shadows'. Former Children's Laureate Michael Morpurgo has written a playful and deeply affectionate introduction. He describes vivid memories of his mother - a RADA trained actress - performing the stories: 'Kipling and my mother, between them, could make words laugh off the page.' Indeed, few words swoop and dive and trip off the tongue as Kipling's do. His stories abound with droll turns of phrase and sing-song repetitions, from the man who lived 'cavily in a Cave' to the 'Superior Comestible' that 'smelt most sentimental'. Though the Just So Stories were first published during the golden age of children's book illustration, no edition has attempted to illuminate Kipling's prose in the rich illustrative style that thrived in his day. For this edition, The Folio Society approached Niroot Puttapipat - a contemporary artist working in the tradition of great golden-age artists such as Edmund Dulac. He has created 14 exquisite paintings, which have been printed with gold borders and tipped in as colour plates. They are complemented by pictorial endpapers, and nine pen-and-ink tailpieces depicting the animals. UK Postage �3.40; Airmail to USA and Canada �44.40; Airmail to most of the Rest of the World (including the EU), �44.40.

Just So Stories for Little Children is a collection of origin stories by the British author Rudyard Kipling. Considered a classic of children's literature, the book is amongst Kipling's best known works.