Mei Li

Garden City: Doubleday Junior Books, 1938. First edition. Cloth. Very Good/no dustjacket. Winner of the second Caldecott Medal for illustrated children's books. Handforth was an artist who worked primarily in engravings and lithographs -- the illustrations in this evocative story of a young girl at a festival in China is in the style of his lithos. The Boston Public Library is working on a catalog raisonne of his print work. This book is quite uncommon in the first edition (as with most Doubleday books, the first says "first edition" on the verso of the title page -- in this case it's on the same line as the copyright information and moderately easy to miss). This copy has no dustjacket and a moderately stained binding -- the gold leaf is also somewhat discolored on both the spine and the front cover. The binding is tight and the endpapers and pages are clean. The original jacket was printed on unfinished stock and is quite fragile -- later jackets are on coated stock and relatively easy to tell from the original, A very cute book, and well worth its award. Not a serious collector's copy, but one that would go nicely with a jacket from an ex-library copy. This book is not x-lib, nor was it marked up by a child. Scarce thus. Pictures available on request.