Ah Wong by TRAVERS, P. L - 1943

[New York: High Grade Press for the Author], 1943. First edition, limited issue. Wrappers chipped at edges and lightly soiled; text with pale dampstain along gutter and lower margins. 8vo. 24 pp. Original blue printed wrappers. SCARCE PRIVATELY PRINTED CHRISTMAS GREETING, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, this is number 311 signed by Travers. This story, and two other Christmas pamphlets by the celebrated author of 'Mary Poppins', remained unpublished commercially until 2014, when Virago released them as an edition. "Ah Wong" tells of the narrator's encounter with a swearing Chinese cook. "Each of the characters she focuses on are really unlikely heroes for the narrator. The encounters take place which she is a young girl - the stories are in the form of a person looking back over their childhood, growing up in Australia on a sugar plantation, when her parents don't seem to be very close to her, but the other characters are," said editor Donna Coonan. "And just like Mary Poppins, each character pops up just when they are needed" (See Alison Flood, "Mary Poppins's real-life model appears in unseen PL Travers story" in The Guardian, 23 June 2014).