Peter and Wendy
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911. Single volume, measuring 8 x 5.5 inches: x, 267, [1]. Original olive pictorial cloth stamped in gilt, original black pictorial dust jacket printed in gilt, priced at $1.50. Frontispiece, pictorial title page, and eleven halftone plates throughout text. Small stain to lower edge of several pages; lightly edgeworn jacket with faded block on front panel; a few small chips.
First American edition of J.M. Barrie’s tale of Peter Pan’s boyhood adventures, the foundation of most future adaptations, issued simultaneously with the first English edition. Barrie’s first account of Peter Pan, published in The Little White Bird (1902), featured Peter as a baby, inspiring Barrie’s collaboration with Arthur Rackham in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906). Peter and Wendy is based on Barrie’s subsequent play featuring Peter Pan as a boy, a major event on the London stage, introducing the iconic characters of Tinker Bell, Captain Hook, and Wendy Darling to the Peter Pan legend: “Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.” A very nearly fine book, gilt bright, in an unrestored first-issue jacket.
Price: $7,600.00