MILNE’S SECOND BOOK OF POETRY FOR CHILDREN: ‘WHEREVER I AM, THERE’S ALWAYS POOH, / THERE’S ALWAYS POOH AND ME’
MILNE, Alan Alexander and Ernest Howard SHEPARD (illustrator). Now We Are Six. London: Jarrold and Sons Ltd. for Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1927.
Octavo (188 x 126mm), pp. x, [2 (fly-title, verso blank)], 103, [1 (imprint)]. Title-vignette after Shepard, illustrations in the text after Shepard, some full-page. (Some light spotting and marking, some short tears, l. 6/8 adhered to l. 8/1 at the gutter and with deep tear.) Original maroon cloth gilt, upper board with border of single gilt rule and central design after Shepard, lower board with design after Shepard, spine lettered and ruled in gilt, top edges gilt, others trimmed, decorated endpapers with design after Shepard. (Some spotting on endpapers, spine and outer areas of boards slightly faded, extremities lightly rubbed and bumped, cracking on hinges.)
First edition. Now We Are Six was Milne’s second collection poems for children (following When we were Very Young), and collected 35 poems which Milne had written (and, in some cases, published) over the preceding years. The book was published in Britain and the United States on 13 October 1927 to great acclaim and by ‘Christmas Now We Are Six had sold 94,000 in England alone, overtaking Winnie-the-Pooh’ (A. Thwaite, The Brilliant Career of Winnie-the-Pooh(London, 1994), p. 105). Some of the poems, such as ‘Us Two’, feature Pooh – who ‘thought it was a different book; and he hopes you won’t mind, but he walked through it one day, looking for his friend Piglet, and sat down on some of the pages by mistake’ (p. viii) – but also a range of other characters, both real and imagined, such as King John, Sir Thomas Tom, and King Hilary.
Haring-Smith, A.A. Milne, C96.
£95
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