PETER PAN IN KENSINGTON GARDENS From the Little White Bird

London: Hodder and Stoughton, (1912). First Printing of the Large Paper and Extra-Illustrated Edition, which is also the first edition to have the plates interleaved within the textblock instead of bound in the rear. With a new tipped-in colour frontispiece plus 49 tipped-in colour plates, plus seven new full-page black and white illustrations and with illustrations within the text by Arthur Rackham. 4to, publisher's original green cloth lettered and elaborately decorated in gilt on the spine and upper cover. 126 pp. A very nice copy, the plates are all in fine order, the text is especially clean and fresh, free of the oft' found foxing except for a very light touch of it only to the first few leaves, the binding is firm and solid, the endpapers intact, the spine panel lightly mellowed. The best edition of Rackham's most desirable book! Here, first appeared a new colored frontispiece, and the additional plates of line drawings also appear in this edition for the first time. This is also the first edition to have the colour plates entertainingly interspersed throughout the text, rather than all being bound together at the rear as in the 1906 edition.
PETER PAN is Rackham's most famous book. Within, we find many of the artist’s best loved and most easily recognized paintings. Perhaps the Pall Mall Gazette summed it best when they said, “Mr. Rackham seems to have dropped out of some cloud in Mr. Barrie’s fairyland, sent by a special providence to make pictures in tune with his whimsical genius.”