Emil and the Detectives

London: Jonathan Cape, 1959. 1st thus. Hardcover. Very Good/Good. Walter Trier. Hardcover in a worn and lightly spotted dust jacket, 192 pages. Introduction by Walter de la Mare. Illustrations by Walter Trier. First printing of the new translation by Eileen Hall. This copy is bound in original yellow linen covered boards with black titles to the front and spine. Kästner's first major success, the only one of his pre-1945 works to escape Nazi censorship, and remains his best-known work, and has been translated into at least 59 languages. The most unusual aspect of the novel, compared to existing children's literature at the time, was that it was realistically set in a contemporary Berlin peopled with some fairly rough characters, not in a sanitized fantasy world; also that it refrained from obvious moralizing, letting the characters' deeds speak for themselves. Name on front fly leaf otherwise clean. Record # 382459