The Pirate Twins

Oblong large 8vo, pp. 28, with 26 full-page colour illustrations and two of script; decorated endpapers; slight offsetting from endpapers to first and last page; original decorated paper boards, with the original dust-wrapper, short tear to front of dust-wrapper, otherwise a clean and bright copy.

William Nicholson final children's book ^gThe Pirate Twins^g was conceived whilst completing the illustrations for Sassoon's ^gThe Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man^g.

'The idea for the ^gPirate Twins^g came from a pair of plain black socks owned by Nicholson which had been bought in Paris but never worn. When she was in her teens, Nicholson's daughter Nancy made these socks up into a pair of stocking dolls; a pattern was stencilled on their vests, and they were given leather belts, necklaces of yellow buttons and cutlasses made of card. Years later, Nicholson conceived the idea of making these twin dolls the central characters in a story dedicated to Nancy and his youngest daughter Liza which Faber eventually published in the same horizontal picture-book format as ^gClever Bill^g' (Campbell, p. 30).

^z'In this story, the Pirate Twins are discovered by Mary - the heroine of ^gClever Bill^g - inside a seashell on the beach. No explanation of this remarkable event is of course necessary, and none is offered. Mary takes the twins home, and cares for and educates them; but one day they run away, leaving a note which says that they have gone for ever. Fortunately, the note adds 'Don't worry, Back Soon', and sure enough, after various adventures, the twins eventually return. To an even greater extent than in ^gClever Bill^g, the plates are the principal vehicle of the story: there are more illustrations than in the earlier book, and the text has been reduced to a mere hundred words or so (shorter than many of the reviews). A drawing featuring a crab and a lobster reflects Nicholson's current passion as a painter of 'fishscapes', but in general still-life gives way to landscape in this book, and some of the best plates are those in which the action takes place against the background of a beautiful stretch of English seashore. (A witty parody of Botticelli's ^gBirth of Venus^g on the endpapers maintains the maritime theme throughout.) Writers who illustrate their own words had of course appeared before (Charles H. Bennett and Edward Lear are examples from the nineteenth century), but few, if any, had produced work of such beauty.' (^gibid.^g)^z

There are three other issues of the work, an edition of 300 copies signed by Nicholson; a cheap edition published in America (the colour reproduction of which Nicholson considered 'poisonous') and a special limited edition of 60 copies each numbered and signed. - Our dust-wrapper has the price of 7s 6d printed on the front flap, which speaks for Faber & Faber having kept piles of the original printing (which was priced 3s 6d in 1929) for quite some time and produced wrappers for marketing the book after the inflationary price rises of the post-war years.