Yours Pictorially: Illustrated Letters (Warne children's classics)

London: Frederick Warne. Very Good/Very Good. 1976. First Edition. Hard Cover. 8vo : 0723219818 Dust jacket complete. Original cloth boards with bright gilt titling. No ownership marks. Frontis portrait plate. Illustrations. 84 pages clean and tight. Randolph Caldecott was not only an eminent artist, acknowledged for over a hundred years as one of the great illustrators of children's books, but a remarkable personality, as this fascinating collection of his letters testify. Some of the letters are to well-known literary and artistic figures of the day, but most of them are personal ones to friends who, fortunately for later generations, treasured them. Caldecott was a prolific illustrator, endowing each of his many books with a charm and wit not known before and scarcely since; for a nursery rhyme as short as Sing a Song for Sixpence he drew thirty illustrations. He wrote as easily as he drew, and he obviously loved writing to his friends, regarding it, he said, as a 'feast'-and this is certainly what these letters are for us, bubbling over with joie de vivre and the sheer sense of fun which Caldecott brought to everyday incidents; all the more remarkable considering his constant ill-health. At tunes his exuberance overflows from words to drawings and in over a hundred of the letters we have this rare and happy combination. The largest number of letters in this collection is to the Victorian children's writer, Mrs Juliana Horatia Ewing, and also included are some of her letters to Caldecott. They are strictly `business' letters between author and illustrator and shed an interesting light on this special relationship. Mrs Ewing thought the world of Caldecott: `I think you stand alone! For an all-roundness of genius in "illustrating" humanity, and human surroundings ... I believe your work will be gathered up again and treasured ...' Michael Hutchins began research for a biography of Caldecott and quickly discovered that his day-to-day letters contained many of the qualities of his published illustrations. .