OUR BABY BOOK

Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, (1907). First edition Bound in blue cloth with beautiful color pictorial pastedown on the front cover. Small quarto, unpaginated. Twelve glorious full page illustrations and ornamental borders in the Art Nouveau style. This book, along with Fanny Cory's Mother Goose, represent a particularly poignant time in the author's family life and both are considered amongst her best work. After losing her first baby in childbirth and suffering other deep personal losses Fanny entered a period of profound grief. She struggled to regain her natural sense of joy, eventually giving birth to three children and creating illustrations that captured her hard won happiness in domestic life. This book is not only an exceptional work of art but a mirror into the artist's home and heart, written and illustrated from her own intimate personal experiences as a mother . It has become a very elusive and sought after title for collectors of finely illustrated books from the turn of the last century. Aside from some very light flecking on the front cover, not affecting the pictorial pastedown, this is a very good copy.