(New York: Duffield & Company, 1910).

A PLEASING COPY OF THIS WONDERFUL CLASSIC, RARELY FOUND IN COLLECTIBLE CONDITION. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s two children’s classics are brought together in this beautifully illustrated volume. These adaptations of classical Greek myths rank among the most enduring children’s stories in English, largely due to Hawthorne’s refusal to write down to his young audience. “Children possess an unestimated sensibility to whatever is deep or high, in imagination or feeling, so long as it is simple, likewise,” writes Hawthorne in his introduction. “It is only the artificial and complex that bewilder them.”
No illustrator is more suited to these tales than Maxfield Parrish, whose own work combines classical elegance and grandeur with a dreamlike otherworldliness. Item #32064

First Edition. With ten colour plates by Maxfield Parrish. Large, royal 8vo, publisher’s original dark blue ribbed cloth with gilt-stamped spine and upper cover, the cover also with a tipped-on Maxfield Parrish illustration in colour, pictorially decorated endleaves by Parrish, pages untrimmed. ix, 358 pp. A very good copy of this illustrated classic, well preserved, internally quite clean with plates and text-block in good order, a bit of bumping or rubbing to the upper corner, the spine panel bright with the gilt well preserved, light evidence of shelving.