Aesop's Fables (Signed Limited Edition)

London: William Heinemann, 1912. First edition. Number 401 of 1,450 copies signed by the illustrator. Original publisher's cloth binding with gilt to spine and front board. Top edge gilt, remaining edges deckled. With a bit of toning to spine and wear to corners. Rear hinge repaired. Internally with some foxing and offsetting to preliminary and terminal pages; long snag to rear pastedown. A pleasing example overall.

The 1st century AD philosopher, Apollonius of Tyana, is recorded as having said about Aesop: "like those who dine well off the plainest dishes, he made use of humble incidents to teach great truths, and after serving up a story he adds to it the advice to do a thing or not to do it. Then, too, he was really more attached to truth than the poets are; for the latter do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable; but he by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events" (Philostratus). Aesop's morality tales endure, and they are made more memorable for Rackham's visual renderings which mix the fanciful with the darker possibilities that lurk within every fable.

Latimore and Haskell 38-39. Riall 111.