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[AUSTRALIAN POST] STRANG, Mrs Herbert (ed.).
Storytime A Little Book for Little People.
London, Henry Frowde, Hodder & Stoughton, circa, 1906.
Small quarto, full colour frontispiece and one plate, 18 leaves, illustrated, printed in red and black; a pristine copy in the original stitch-sewn purple paper wrappers, colour plate tipped on to front cover; in the original mailing envelope of matching purple embossed card, envelope a little sunned, and missing original tie-back, with a second tipped on colour plate, addressed in cursive script, two 1d New South Wales stamps at top right, cancelled "Edgecliff" (date illegible).
A lovely and attractive rarity: an almost unrecorded Rackham title, in pristine condition and still with its original decorated mailing envelope, sent from New South Wales to South Australia around 1910. The beautifully decorated envelope has been sent to "Master Mortie deLiut" (sp?) of Kingston, Lacepede Bay, South Australia. Two New South Wales "one penny" stamps are affixed, and have been cancelled at Edgecliff; although the date of cancellation is sadly indistinct, the stamps are certainly contemporaneous with the book.
Herbert Strang was a pseudonym used by two English writers, George Herbert Ely and James L'Estrange, for their children's books. Perhaps better known for their books for boys, they used the name Mrs Herbert Strang for their stories written for girls, as here (see The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature).
The frontispiece is by Arthur Rackham, and signed 1906 (hence the tentative date for the book). The image depicts a charming scene from the book, and is captioned "'I tell you,' Robert said, 'it's raining.'" This line is also the first sentence of the book, perhaps implying that the image was commissioned for this title (or, just as likely, that the first story was written to fit an existing plate). The book is well-illustrated throughout, and includes a second full-colour plate by the renowned illustrator Rosa C. Petherick, with the caption "The Cradle that Swings".
This is a particularly rare work, with no listing on OCLC, and it is not recorded in Hudson's Bibliography of Rackham nor Gumuchian's Livres d'Enfance. A copy is thought to be held in the Bodleian.
Not in Gumuchian.
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