Jumblies - First Edition - Signed - Edward Lear - Bauman Rare Books

Jumblies

Edward LEAR | Edward GOREY

Item#: 87303 We're sorry, this item has been sold

Jumblies

Jumblies

“THEIR HEADS ARE GREEN, AND THEIR HANDS ARE BLUE, AND THEY WENT TO SEA IN A SIEVE”: EDWARD LEAR’S THE JUMBLIES, SIGNED BY ILLUSTRATOR EDWARD GOREY

LEAR, Edward. The Jumblies. Drawings by Edward Gorey. New York: Young Scott, (1969). Slim oblong octavo, original pictorial beige paper boards, pictorial endpapers, original dust jacket.

First edition of famed illustrator Gorey’s interpretation of Lear’s nonsense verse, signed by Gorey on the title page.

Edward Lear started his career at the age of 15, drawing ornithological pictures. “From 1832 to 1836 he was engaged at Knowsley, the residence of the Earl of Derby…With the family at Knowsley he was always a great favorite, and it was for his patron’s grandchildren that Lear invented his droll Book of Nonsense, which was first published in 1846” (DNB). With its refrain of “Far and few, far and few / Are the lands where the Jumblies live; / Their heads are green, and their hands are blue / and they went to sea in a Sieve,” The Jumblies quickly became a favorite among Lear’s nonsense verse, “a poem Lear issued with only a headpiece drawing of the Sieve underway… It is they [the Jumblies in Gorey’s illustrations] who make the long journey successful, even feasible in pictures; and who, at each recurrence of the refrain, dispose themselves in one or another choreographic pattern, now in a casual line along the shore, now before a parapet as a human pyramid, now as a concert audience, circling dancers, statuettes. At the close, after the Jumblies’ triumphal return, we hear the refrain once more and see in the last rays of evening the Sieve pulled up on shore, its sail trailing limply in the water” (Bader, 556-57). Lear continued the story of the Jumblies in The Dong with a Luminous Nose, which Gorey illustrated in 1969. Of his own writings, “Gorey maintains that his stories are simply entertainments in the nonsense tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear” (Silvey, 278). With this volume, he pays homage to one of his forebears. Toledano B38a.

A fine signed copy.

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Aquatint Copperplate process by which the plate is “bitten” by exposure to acid. By changing the areas of the plate that are exposed and the length of time the plate is submerged in the acid bath, the engraver can obtain fine and varying shades of gray that closely resemble watercolor washes. Although the name contains the word “tint”, this is a black-and-white printing process; aquatint plates can often be hand colored, however.
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