“SO I THINK I’LL BE SIX NOW FOR EVER AND EVER”: LIMITED FIRST AMERICAN EDITION OF NOW WE ARE SIX, SIGNED BY MILNE AND SHEPARD

MILNE, A.A. Now We Are Six. With Decorations by Ernest H. Shepard. New York: E.P. Dutton, (1927). Square octavo, original three-quarter pink cloth and pictorial blue boards, printed paper spine label, original dust jacket, uncut and unopened, original pictorial cardboard gift box, custom clamshell box. $5800.

Signed limited large-paper copy of the first American edition, number 168 of only 200 copies signed by both Milne and illustrator Ernest Shepard. A beautiful copy.

This delightful collection of poetry featuring Christopher Robin and his famous bear is the third book in Milne's classic "Pooh Quartet." Along with the first book, When We Were Very Young (1924), this title "enjoyed immediate and phenomenal success, and through the years the fun and surprise in them, and the gaiety evoked by their meticulous meter, amusing rhymes and pictorial quality have made them only a little less known to English-speaking children than the rhymes of Mother Goose… In these poems children can see themselves, while adults catch nostalgic glimpses of the children they once were, the children they once knew, or see with absolute clarity the very children to whom they are reading the rhymes" (Meigs et al., 594). Issued in the same year as the first English and American trade editions as well as an English signed limited edition, also of 200 copies. Cutler & Stiles, 116.

Modest toning to original cardboard box. A fine and beautiful copy.