Tales of the Punjab Told by the People. With Illustrations by J. Lockwood Kipling and Notes by R. C. Temple.
1894. London: Macmillan and Co., 1894.
8vo, xvi, 395 pp., frontispiece, 4 plates, vignettes throughout. Discreet title page blindstamp “Presentation copy” lower right corner. Original dark green cloth, dark green endpapers, a.e.g., with pictorial decorations in gilt. Joints cracked, otherwise a very good, bright copy.
§ First edition thus of this scarce title; a previous collection of stories appeared in 1884 under the title Wide-Awake Stories. A notable collection, and one of the earliest in English of 43 Punjabi tales collected and recounted by the English writer Flora Annie Steele (1847-1929). Steele spent 22 years in India, chiefly in the Punjab. Rejecting the role of idle “mehmsahib” she became an educational reformer and an outspoken critic of the colonial government’s failings. She became deeply interested the local language and folk-tales and with Rudyard Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling worked to support Indian arts and crafts. The beautiful illustrations are by John Lockwood Kipling and Temple’s notes provide helpful historical and cultural information. The beautiful binding is a design of a peacock and jackal under a flowering tree, and reproduces one of Kipling’s illustrations.
The book is one of the rarest of the Cranford Series: twenty-four illustrated volumes issued over a period of thirty-two years, 1876-1907, by Macmillan and Co. All are crown 8vo; all have edges cut and gilt; all are bound in smooth shiny cloth of a uniform dark shade of green; and all have the fronts and the spines of these bindings heavily stamped with gold designs.
It was not until seventeen years and the issue of a fifth volume that it was even recognized as a series, and then it took its name, not from its originator, Caldecott, nor from its first volume, Old
Christmas, but from its fourth volume, Cranford by Mrs. Gaskell, 1891. In 1892 when six new volumes were issued by the name of Cranford, the name was extended to the entire group,
including the three previous volumes. (See T. Balston, “The Cranford Series and Its Imitators”, pp. 186-88, The Bookman’s Journal, Vol. XII, No. 47 (New Series), August, 1925.
In addition to the twenty-four “Cranford” volumes, there are a dozen or more other volumes which are ‘derivatives,’ similar-looking volumes issued by other publishers, including Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner; George Allen’ and F. S. Ells; they are often mistaken for the Cranford series, but are not part of it. Item #124277
Price: $695.00