CHOO CHOO

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1937. Near fine in very good minus dust jacket.. True first edition of this story of an adventurous steam engine bored with her usual commute - Virginia Lee Burton's first book. Virginia Lee Burton had a knack for humanizing inanimate objects. Her 1943 book THE LITTLE HOUSE won the Caldecott Medal, and her 1938 MIKE MULLIGAN AND HIS STEAM SHOVEL is still beloved by young aspiring engineers. CHOO CHOO is an early example of her talent for characterization as well as her unique style of hand-lettering and illustration, which a HORN BOOK review praised for its "same kind of havoc and excitement on a large machine scale that John Gilpin did on a small horse with his famous ride in Caldecott's pen-and-ink watercolor drawings" (Elleman, 29). An excellent copy of the beginning of an iconic career. 12'' x 9''. Original orange pictorial boards. Original unclipped ($1.50) black, white, and red pictorial dust jacket with WIGGLES blurb on rear flap. Color pictorial endpapers of a train track running through a picturesque town. Illustrated in black and white. Hand-lettered name and publisher on title page (ref. Elleman). [48] pages. Owner name to front flyleaf. Jacket with mild toning and wear, a sizable chip to upper spine; smaller chipping to corners and lower spine. Binding with a bit of edgewear, faint area of sunning. Interior clean and bright.