JACK THE GIANT KILLER (HUGH THOMSON'S ILLUSTRATED FAIRY BOOKS)

York, England: Macmillan and Co. Limited, 1898. First Edition. Softcover in custom case. Good. Softbound 8 1/4" x 6 3/4. A suppressed work by the hugely prolific illustrator Hugh Thomson. With bright color images to front and rear panels, sixteen full-page color chromolithograph illustrations within, and all the other pages with several black and white illustrations along right and left margins, and along the bottom of each page, which drive the story forward.

Thomson pulled no punches in this gorey, pull-no-punches retelling of the famous folk ("Jack") tale. 31 pp. An old cello-tape repair along front cover, and a small taped patch to front panel. Housed in custom slipcase, quarter-bound black calf over marbled boards, double-ruled in gilt, with apparently later spine label laid over original, this one with bold silver lettering and linked-diamond decorations. Quite uncommon. OCLC lists only one library -- The National Library of Scotland -- as holding an actual, physical copy of this censored work. The illustrations are fabulous, graphic, horrific, and without a doubt, frightening enough to scare the knickers off lads and lasses now long buried in that giant-free place, surely at peace. "...the delayed JACK THE GIANT KILLER, announced as the first of "Hugh Thomson's 'Illustrated Fairy Books' -- and destined to be the only one. The artist, with something of a child's delight in fearsome 'make believe', had rendered the story all too realistically for the taste of those grown-up folks who are the buyers of children's books. Most healthy children themselves find delight in the weird and gory - hence the lasting vogue of stories such as this particular one -- but their elders...regard their youngsters as delicate sentimentalists, to whom the grim and gory would be shocking. Thus it was that the monstrous giants of Hugh Thomson's imagining failed to win popularity, and that, in spite of all the glory of riotouscolour and fantastic atrocity, the series did not pass beyond this tentative first quarto-size pamphlet..." ("Hugh Thomson: His Art His Letters His humour and His Charm" by M.H. Spielman and Walter Jerrold, 1931).