The Little House
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942. Single volume, measuring 9 x 9.5 inches: [4], 40. Original pictorial blue-green cloth stamped in white, pictorial endpapers printed in red and black, original unclipped color pictorial dust jacket. Color illustrations throughout text. Light soiling and edgewear to jacket, with closed tears and chip to front panel.
First edition of Virginia Lee Burton’s tale of a country house swallowed up by the expanding modern city, winner of the Caldecott Medal for 1943. The opening pages introduce children to the cycles of the sun and moon, and the changing of the seasons; Burton depicts the countryside in the patterned folk-art style that characterized her printmaking with the Folly Cove Designers in Gloucester, Massachusetts. As the new highway brings urban sprawl closer and closer to the Little House, the rhythms of the natural world fall away: “Now the Little House only saw the sun at noon, and didn’t see the moon or stars at night at all because the lights of the city were too bright.” In the end, the Little House is rescued and returned to the countryside, a journey inspired by Burton’s relocation of her own Folly Cove house away from the main road into a field of daisies. First issue dust jacket priced at $1.75, with no Caldecott Medal to jacket. Grolier Children’s 100, 86. A very good example of a modern children's classic.
Price: $5,500.00