"HERE IS EDWARD BEAR, COMING DOWNSTAIRS NOW, BUMP, BUMP, BUMP…": LOVELY FIRST EDITION OF WINNIE-THE-POOH

MILNE, A.A. Winnie-The-Pooh. London: Methuen, 1926. Octavo, original green pictorial cloth, pictorial endpapers, top edge gilt, original dust jacket. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. $9000.

First edition of the beloved book of adventures in the Hundred Acre Wood, with charming illustrations by Ernest H. Shepard—a lovely copy in the original dust jacket.

"Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh has been considered a classic of children's literature almost since its publication" (Cooper & Cooper, 95). In 1925, Milne acquired "a Sussex farmhouse for use as a weekend and holiday alternative to the family's London home… [that would] provide the setting for the stories he now started to write about [his son] Christopher's toys… Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner [its companion volume, published 1928] are, on their own terms, more successful as works written for children than anything else produced during children's literature's Golden Age" (Carpenter, 201, 205). "Ernest H. Shepard's illustrations, modeled after the actual toys, show character and movement in simple line vignettes, which add so much to the books that most people consider them to be inseparable from the texts" (Silvey, 462). Payne IIA. Cutler & Stiles, 116. Bookseller label.

Book fine; dust jacket bright and fine with only most minor toning to spine. A beautiful copy, very scarce in this condition.