Mother Goose Melodies Toybooks.
[ New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1914. With 4 black-and-white illustrations in each booklet to accompany the rhymes. Some creasing to pages and wrappers and some toning throughout the set. Open tear at fore-edge of page 3 in the Little Miss Muffet booklet (with no text or images affected). Overall a very good, clean, and attractive set. Original stiff paper wrappers, each with a color reproduction of a different plate from The Jessie Willcox Smith Mother Goose. With gilt border and lettering. Rear cover printed with an advertisement for Colgate talcum powder. 10 booklets, 5 inches by 3 inches. 8 pp. each. Item #16754
11 of 12 booklets, 5 ¼ inches by 3 ½ inches. 8 pp. each. The Jessie Willcox Smith Mother Goose was first published by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1914. There are no previous editions of these Toybooks, which were published in a set of twelve. The titles included here are Little Miss Muffet Sat on a Tuffet; Rain, Rain Go Away; Little Bo-peep; Mary, Mary Quite Contrary; Ring a-round a Rosie; See Saw, Margery Daw; Curly Locks, Curly Locks, Wilt Thou Be Mine?; One Foot Up, the other Foot Down; Hush-a-bye-Baby On the Tree Top; Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater; and Jack and Jill Went Up the Hill. The missing title is There was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. Jessie Willcox Smith (1863 – 1935) was one of the most important illustrators of children’s books during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the second woman inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. She was a regular contributor of illustrations to the magazines Century, Scribner’s, Harper’s, and was, along with Maxfield Parrish, one of the seven leading artists contracted to work exclusively for Collier’s in 1905. Smith illustrated every printed cover of Good Housekeeping between 1917 and 1933 and originally released black-and-white versions of many of her Mother Goose illustrations in the magazine. Aside from her Mother Goose illustrations, some of her best-known work includes her illustrations for a 1915 edition of Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies and editions of several Charles Dickens novels.
This is a rare set. There are only seven of these titles listed on OCLC and no more than three copies of each. The only significant holding for these toy books noted on OCLC is Princeton’s set of seven titles. Nudelman. Jessie Willcox Smith: A Bibliography, A40.
Price: $450.00