Poor Cecco

From the Author of The Velveteen Rabbit Margery Williams' Wonderful Wooden Dog Illustrated by Arthur Rackham [RACKHAM, Arthur, illustrator]. BIANCO, Margery Williams. Poor Cecco. The Wonderful Story of a Wonderful Wooden Dog Who was the Jolliest Toy in the House until He Went out to Explore the World. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. London: Chatto & Windus, 1925. First English trade edition. No English limited edition was issued. Quarto (10 x 7 1/4 inches; 253 x 186 mm.). 175, [1] pp. With seven mounted color plates by Arthur Rackham and twenty-four drawings in black and white. Publisher's orange cloth, front cover pictorially stamped and lettered in red with a vignette of Cecco and his companions, spine lettered in red. Plain endpapers. Small neat ink ownership signature on front free endpaper. Some light wear at spine extremities, otherwise a very good copy of one of Rackham's most charming later illustrated books. The delightful story of a wooden dog who escapes from the toy cupboard to explore the world - written by the author of The Velveteen Rabbit and magnificently illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Margery Williams Bianco returned in Poor Cecco to the enchanted world of toys that had produced her enduring masterpiece, The Velveteen Rabbit. Here the hero is Cecco, a wonderfully independent wooden dog - described as a "loose-jointed thing like a dog" - who leaves the security of the toy cupboard and sets off into the wider world accompanied by his friend Bulka, the rag puppy. What follows is an episodic adventure populated by animals, toys and an assortment of extraordinary characters, combining Williams' characteristic belief in the secret emotional lives of childhood possessions with a considerably more rambunctious spirit of adventure than that of The Velveteen Rabbit. The story provided Arthur Rackham with unusually congenial material. His seven mounted color plates bring Williams' strange miniature world vividly to life: cats loom threateningly over tiny protagonists; toys and discarded household objects acquire an almost magical significance; and human streets and gardens become enormous landscapes when viewed from the perspective of Cecco and his companions. The additional black-and-white drawings extend Rackham's visual interpretation throughout the text. The surviving plates beautifully demonstrate the richness and variety of Rackham's illustrations for the book. Rackham was by 1925 one of the most celebrated illustrators of the Golden Age of British book illustration. Poor Cecco, however, gave him something rather different from the fairy tales, legends and literary classics with which he was most closely associated. Williams' world of animated toys allowed him to combine the fantastic with the domestic - the magical realm existing not in some remote enchanted forest but immediately beyond the toy cupboard. The result is one of the particularly successful collaborations of Rackham's later career. The story, with the same plates and drawings, first appeared serially in Good Housekeeping, beginning in May 1925, before its appearance in book form. Margery Williams Bianco (1881-1944) had established her lasting reputation three years earlier with The Velveteen Rabbit; or, How Toys Become Real (1922), illustrated by William Nicholson. She returned repeatedly to the imaginative world of toys and animals. The Little Wooden Doll followed in 1925, illustrated by her daughter Pamela Bianco, and later that same year came Poor Cecco, with Rackham as illustrator. As The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature observes, the "much admired" Poor Cecco concerns a wooden toy, a "loose-jointed thing like a dog," whose departure from the toy cupboard leads to a lengthy succession of adventures with Bulka, the rag puppy; significantly, the first edition was illustrated by Rackham. Where Toys Become Adventurers: Poor Cecco occupies a particularly appealing place in the history of illustrated children's literature: a companion in spirit.…