Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, (1939). Single volume, measuring 8.5 x 9.5 inches: [48]. Original beige pictorial cloth stamped in black and red, color pictorial endpapers, original unclipped color pictorial dust jacket. Color illustrations throughout text. Inscribed on half-title: “To Iris with love from Jinnee –Virginia Lee Burton.” Tiny ink stamp to rear pastedown. Faint tidemark to head of jacket spine, light edgewear with several closed tears to jacket, a few stray smudges to text.
Early printing of Caldecott winner Virginia Lee Burton’s most popular title, warmly inscribed with her childhood nickname “Jinnee.” The story follows Mike Mulligan and his old-fashioned steam shovel Mary Anne as they race to dig the cellar for the Popperville town hall in a single day: “never had they dug so fast and so well; and never had the sun seemed to go down so fast.” In the end, Mary Anne finds a second career as the steam furnace “warming up the meetings in the new town hall.” Burton's experience with the Folly Cove group of designers is evident in her thoughtfully balanced illustrations, which reflect her attention to “pattern, repetition, spacing, and sense of movement” (Elleman, 38). Early printing, with dust jacket price of $1.75, and no mention of Burton's 1941 picture book, Calico the Wonder Horse. See Barbara Elleman, Virginia Lee Burton: A Life in Art. A very good copy, scarce inscribed.
Price: $6,000.00