1905 Rip Van Winkle

Description

Colour Plates, Early Edition, Illustrated, Publishers' Original Binding

The second impression of this Rackham edition, published two months after the first impression in November 1905.

Illustrated with a colour frontispiece, and forty-nine colour plates. Collated, bound without one plate.

'Rip Van Winkle' tells the tale of a Dutch-American man in colonial America who consumes the liquor of Dutchmen and falls asleep twenty years later, having slept through the American Revolution.

Irving is one of the most popular authors of the history of American literature. He first achieved literary fame with his work 'The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon', and is well known today for his short stories, such as 'Rip Van Winkle' and 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'. Irving was an incredibly popular and influential author, being one of the first American writers to achieve acclaim in Europe, and influencing the likes of Lord Byron, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, and more.

Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Rackham was a book illustrator who illustrated editions of 'The Ingoldsby Legends', 'The Wind in the Willows', 'Grimm's Fairy Tales', and 'Gulliver's Travels', as well as contributing frequently to periodicals. He is considered to be one of the leaders of the 'Golden Age' of book illustrations.