Books

First edition illustrated by Rackham. 4to. Original green cloth with gilt lettering and vignette in rare publisher's green printed dustwrapper. A near fine copy with a touch of fading to the spine but the cloth clean and the gilt sparklingly bright. Some foxing to the preliminary leaves, all plates in perfect condition. The dustwrapper is very good and shows a little fraying to the spine ends and corners and a couple of tears to the rear joint with minor loss, but is clean and principally complete. A well preserved example of this fragile and very rarely encountered dustwrapper. Frontispiece and 50 further colour plates by Rackham mounted onto green art paper and protected by tissue guards, bound together at the end of the text. Rackham's first major work and the first of the opulent large quarto illustrated gift books heralding the beginning of 'The Golden Age of Book Illustration'. The dustwrapper contains review of the Leicester Galleries Exhibition on the upper cover and the 15/- price on the spine.

Rip Van Winkle is a short story by the American author Washington Irving, published in 1819 as part of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. The story is set in New York's Catskill Mountains and follows Rip Van Winkle, a Dutch American villager who falls asleep before the American Revolution and wakes up twenty years later to a very different world. His disappearance and return are met with incredulity by those around him. This tale is known for its themes of change and continuity, the American past, and individualism.