£2,500 - £3,500
Potter (Beatrix), The Tailor of Gloucester, signed, dedicated and inscribed by the author: To Elizabeth Tyson/with kind regards from Beatrix Potter/Sept 6. 1933 [...], first edition, one of 500 copies, London: [Privately printed by] Strangeways and Sons, December 1902, [64]pp, colour frontispiece and 15 plates, the interior predominantly fresh and clean, prelims with very minor speckled foxed spots in places, original pink papered boards, rounded back, printed pictorial vignette and letters, slightly rubbed and bumped, the boards, with signs of some minor soiled handling and toning, but fundamentally untouched, 16mo, [Linder p. 420; Quinby 3]
Provenance: Elizabeth Tyson (1878-1970) thence by descent in her extended family to the present vendor
A very good copy of the rare privately printed edition of The Tailor of Gloucester, apparently hardly, if ever, touched by juvenile hands.
Of all her books The Tailor of Gloucester remained Beatrix Potter's own favourite. This, the privately printed edition, differs from Warne's later commercial edition of 1903: the text, for example, is substantially longer as Frederick Warne insisted on cuts; which Miss Potter had appreciated in advance, writing on December 19th, 1902, 'Dear Mr. Warne, [...] I was quite sure in advance that you would cut out the tailor and all my favourite rhymes! Which was one of the reasons why I printed it myself.' (Linder, A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter (London, 1971), p. 116).
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