In Powder & Crinoline

London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913. One of 500 Copies Signed by Kay Nielsen
Specially Bound by Sangorski & Sutcliffe

[NIELSEN, Kay, illustrator]. QUILLER-COUCH, Sir Arthur. In Powder & Crinoline. Old Fairy Tales Retold by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Illustrated by Kay Nielsen. London: Hodder & Stoughton, [n.d., 1913].

Edition de Luxe. Limited to 500 copies (this copy being No. 40), numbered and signed by the artist.

Large quarto (12 x 9 7/8 inches; 305 x 252 mm.). [2, limitation leaf], xii, [13]-163, [1] pp. Inserted title and twenty-six mounted color plates on gray paper with descriptive tissue-guards. Fifteen black & white text illustrations, decorative top margins to text leaves.

Bound ca. 1925 by Sangorski & Sutcliffe, stamp signed on verso of front free-endpaper. Three-quarter crushed brown morocco over patterned boards ruled in gilt. Spine with five raised bands decoratively paneled and tooled in gilt in compartments. Two blue morocco labels lettered in gilt. Matching patterned endpapers, top edge gilt.

A fine example of a mid 1920s binding by Sangorski & Sutcliffe, very similar to the bindings used for The Golden Cockerel Press Troilus and Criseyde (1927) and The Canterbury Tales (1929-31).

Danish illustrator and designer Kay Nielsen (1886-1957) "was drawn early on to fairy tales and illustrated many volumes for Hodder & Stoughton: In Powder and Crinoline (1913), East of the Sun, West of the Moon (1914), Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales (drawings completed in 1912, but first published in 1924), Hansel and Gretel (1925), and Red Magic (Jonathan Cape, 1930), a collections of fairy tales from around the world. Nielsen's designs unite strong linearity with delicate colouring...Characterized by a sense of two-dimensional flatness, Nielsen's objects and people are highly stylized: foxglove blossoms hang in measured asymmetry; princes and princesses stand on improbably long legs; and their garments billow in gravity-defying parabolas. The power of his illustrations lies in his uncanny ability to retrieve a story's emotional effect on its reader and to recreate it visually in two dimensions" (The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales).

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944), "English critic, writer, and compiler of Cornish descent who published under the pseudonym ‘Q'. Among his many anthologies, Quiller-Couch put together three collections of fairy tales. In 1895 he published Fairy Tales Far and Near Re-told, with illustrations by H.R. Millar. For his The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales from the Old French Re-told (1910), illustrated by Edmund Dulac, Quiller-Couch translated and retold tales by Charles Perrault (‘Bluebeard', ‘Cinderella', and ‘Sleeping Beauty') and Mme de Villeneuve (‘Beauty and the Beast') taken from the French Cabinet des fées (1785-9). His third collection, In Powder and Crinoline: Old Fairy Tales Retold (1913), illustrated by Kay Nielsen, includes a version of ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses'" (The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales).

The Fairy Tales:

Minon-Minette
Felicia or The Pot of Pinks
The Twelve Dancing Princesses
Rosanie or The Inconstant Prince
The Man Who Never Laughed
John and the Ghosts
The Czarina's Violet.