WHERE THE BLUE BEGINS

London and New York: William Heinemann and Doubleday, Page & Co. , [1922 - 1925]. First edition, American issue, undated. With 4 colour plates and 16 line drawings by Arthur Rackham. 4to, publisher's original royal blue cloth lettered and decorated in gilt on the spine and upper cover. x, 227 pp. A beautiful copy in unusually fine and bright condition. SCARCE FIRST EDITION AND A VERY FINE COPY. A wonderfully imaginative tale out of Christopher Morley’s oeuvre. Rackham’s colour illustrations are quite unusual and marry perfectly to this splendid story.
A highly unusual story in which Mr. Gissing, a gentledog of leisure contentedly residing in Canine Estates with Fuji, his butler (a Japanese pug), on an income of 1,000 bones a year, becomes dissatisfied and leaves home to search for where the blue begins (a purpose to life).
"Morley admirably creates a canine world through names alone. There are Mike Terrier, the curate Mr. J. Rover Poodle, the upper-class and working-class neighbors Mrs. Airedale and Mrs. Collie, the nursemaid Mrs. Spaniel and little Shaggy, her puppy, Gissing’s adopted puppies Groups, Bunks, and Yelpers, haughty Mr. and Mrs. Chow and their “intolerably spotless” little Sandy, the landlady Mrs. Purps, the salesclerk Miss Whippet, the matronly Mrs. Mastiff, the compulsive shopper Mrs. Dachshund, the parishioners Mr. Dobermann-Pinscher, Mrs. Griffon, and Mrs. Retriever. There are the place names like Dalmatian Heights and the little shrine of St. Spitz. These are intermixed with humanless real locales like Paris and Atlantic City, Murray Hill and Fifth Avenue and Broadway and Wall Street, Delmonico’s Restaurant and Trinity Church, and real historical personages like the Grimm brothers, Hans Christian Andersen, and Masefield; to make this our real world only inhabited by dogs, rather than some imaginary planet of dogs." - Fred Patten