Just So Stories: For Little Children

Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories: For Little Children, London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1902

251 pages illustrated with 22 plates (few scribbled by crayons) designed by Kipling himself; original publisher's black-and-white-stamped pictorial red cloth
9.5 x 7.25 x 0.75 in (24 x 18.5 x 2.2 cm)

Ink gift inscription dated 1932 to endpapers.

Just So Stories has "achieved nursery immortality because a genius has married two of the most tried and trusted favourite media - the fable and the fairy-story." (Muir, p. 107). "Kipling's own witty black-and-white drawings...together with their extensive and ridiculous captions, are one of the chief delights of the book." (Carpenter & Prichard, p. 285).

Next to "The Jungle Book" series, "Just So Stories" is the Nobel Prize Winner's best-known work. These celebrated, invented origin stories, many of which he first told his daughter Effie, include "How the Camel got his Hump," "How the Rhinoceros got his Skin," "How the Leopard got his Spots" and "The Elephant's Child." The book was published simultaneously by Macmillan in London and The Century Co. in New York. This is the only book by Kipling books that was also illustrated by the author. When several of the stories were first serialised in The Ladies' Home Journal, they contained different pictures by Frank Ver Beck. (Richards A181; Stewart 260)

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