RAGAMUFFINS: Twenty-Four Drawings and Verses.

First edition, first printing. Superbly bound in full brown morocco by Wood of London. Five raised bands to the spine with titles in gilt. Gilt device to the upper board and Stanley's coat of arms in gilt to the lower. All edges gilt. Marbled endpapers. Illustrated with 24 tissue-guarded sepia plates of drawings by Lady Stanley. Contained within the original custom made brown cloth fleece-lined solander box. A near fine copy, the binding square, firm and exceptionally bright. The contents with some light scattered foxing are otherwise clean throughout and remain free from any previous owners' inscriptions or stamps. The solander box, aside from a couple of minor bumps, is in very good order.

A sumptuously bound copy of Lady Stanley's posthumously published collection of characterful drawings depicting London's street children. Wife of the famed African explorer Henry Stanley, Lady Dorothy Stanley (ne้ Tennant) was herself an accomplished artist, first exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1886 and subsequently at the New Gallery and Grosvenor Gallery in London, as well as in Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester. The gilt coat of arms, reproduced from the book's standard cloth binding, were, as the preface notes, granted to the Stanley's adopted son Denzil, later a captain in the 14th Hussars, "in allusion to and commemorative of the important services rendered by Sir Henry Morton Stanley, by his discoveries in Central Africa". Notably, the Central African shield and natives' heads were also drawn by Lady Stanley. A most attractive binding by the firm of Henry T. Wood, which later merged with Sangorski & Sutcliffe in 1939, likely executed under the direction of their chief binder Kenneth Hobson.

Stock code: 19977

£325

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Published:

London: The Medici Society.
1929

Category

Children's / Illustrated
Modern First Editions
Literature
Poetry
Bindings
Art Books
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