Wind In The Willows

Second edition, published same month as the first (October 1908), with a tissue-guarded frontispiece, by Graham Robertson, showing three cherubic children frolicking by a waterfall while an otter slips into the pool nearby. Post 8vo (7.75 x 5.25 ins); pp [8], [1], 2-302. [2] blank. With a half-title. Publisher's mid blue cloth-backed boards, lightly rubbed, blocked in gilt with the figures of Pan and the book's animal characters, Mole, Ratty and Toad, the latter appearing on the spine in his driving goggles. Gilt on front really bright, a touch dulled on the spine, which slightly frayed at tail. Top edge gilt, others untrimmed, as issued. Cream endpapers very slightly toned, suggestion of bookplate sometime removed from the front pastedown. Occasional spotting, especially on pps. 144 to 147 and 230-31. Overall, a VG copy. The Wind in the Willows (the original title was the less euphonic Wind in the Reeds), was first published in New York on 4 October 1908, and in London four days later. The publisher, Algernon Methuen, listed it as an adult not a juvenile book. It was certainly more than a light-hearted narrative about a riverside community of animals. Grahame's biographer, Matthew Dennison, called it "an aggressively conservative book," targeting "socialism and any form of faddishness or craving for novelty, Toad's great weakness". (Rupert Neelands) One of the central classics of children's fiction, it was Grahame's fourth book and began life as a series of bedtime stories told to his son Alastair, known as Mouse … the first of these was told on Mouse's fourth birthday, 12 May 1904, and concerned "moles, giraffes & water-rats", these being the animals the boy had selected... (Oxford Companion to Children's Literature)