RACKHAM, Arthur (illus.); AESOP.

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Aesop's Fables. First Rackham edition, signed limited issue, and first edition of this translation; number 1,191 of 1,450 copies signed by the artist."The peculiar secret of Rackham's success in seizing upon the essence of the human and portraying it in animal form, which is after all the basic device of the morality, is unwittingly touched upon in Chesterton's delightful introduction to the 1912 edition of Aesop's Fables: 'There can be no good fable with human beings in it. There can be no good fairy tale without them.' Rackham's genius is such that it bridges the two, and carries the didactic fable into the realm of fairy story, and lends to the imaginative world of fairies a tangible and convincing reality" (Gettings, pp. 83-84).

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