The Crab that Played with the Sea (A Just So Stories)

The Crab that Played with the Sea (A Just So Stories) Rudyard Kipling Illustrated by Michael Foreman London: Macmillan Children’s Books, 1982. First edition with Michael Foreman’s illustrations (1st Macmillan edition). A Just So Story. ISBN 0 333 34134 1 / 978-0-333-34134-6. Laminated pictorial boards. 31–32 pp. Colour illustrations throughout. Printed in Italy by New Interlitho, Milan. Condition: As New. Pristine copy in original laminated pictorial boards. No marks, creases, bumps, or wear to boards, spine, or corners. Pages bright, crisp, and unmarked. Appears unread. A superb example. This is one of the classic origin stories from Rudyard Kipling’s celebrated Just So Stories for Little Children (first collected 1902). In the Time of the Very Beginnings, the Eldest Magician prepares the Earth and the Sea and teaches every animal how to play at being itself. Pau Amma the King Crab, however, refuses obedience, slips into the deep waters, and begins playing with the tides—flooding the Perak River, overturning canoes, and causing chaos. The Magician, the Man, and his little daughter set out in a canoe to confront him. After a dramatic chase across the seas of the Malay Archipelago, Pau Amma is humbled, reduced in size, and given his scissors (claws). In return he receives the gift of living both under the water and on land, though once a year all crabs must shed their hard shells to remember the Magician’s power. The story charmingly explains the tides, the crab’s amphibious nature, and its annual moult, framed in Kipling’s distinctive, rhythmic, oral-storytelling style addressed to “O my Best Beloved.” Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) during the British Raj, the son of the artist and teacher John Lockwood Kipling and Alice MacDonald. After a difficult childhood education in England he returned to India as a young journalist, producing early collections such as Plain Tales from the Hills and Departmental Ditties. His international reputation was secured by Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895), Kim (1901), and the Just So Stories (1902). The latter began as bedtime stories told “just so” to his daughter Josephine; after her tragic death from pneumonia in 1899 he completed and published the collection. In 1907 Kipling became the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is buried in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. His work continues to be widely read for its narrative energy, mastery of the short story and verse, and vivid portrayal of both imperial and domestic life. Michael Foreman OBE (born 21 March 1938) is one of Britain’s most distinguished and prolific children’s book illustrators and authors. Born in the Suffolk fishing village of Pakefield, where his mother kept the village shop, he studied at Lowestoft School of Art, St Martin’s School of Art, and the Royal College of Art (winning a travel scholarship to the United States). He has illustrated or written more than 250 books, ranging from his own wartime memoirs (War Boy, Kate Greenaway Medal 1989) and collaborations with Michael Morpurgo to classic texts by Shakespeare, Dickens, Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and Kipling. Foreman has twice won the Kate Greenaway Medal (1982 and 1989) and has twice been the UK nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award. He was appointed OBE in 2022 for services to literature. His fluid watercolour style, often featuring expansive landscapes and luminous skies, is ideally suited to Kipling’s imaginative world; this 1982 Macmillan edition was among the first individual Just So titles to receive his distinctive contemporary illustrations. A delightful single-title edition that pairs one of Kipling’s most engaging animal fables with the atmospheric artwork of a modern master of children’s illustration. Ideal for collectors of illustrated Kipling, Foreman, or classic children’s literature.…