SENDAK, Maurice (illus.); BOND, Gladys Baker.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Seven Little Stories on Big Subjects: First editions, first printings. "The tales deal with conflicts children face, particularly in regard to bullying and physical violence. Sendak, then a self-taught artist in his late twenties just beginning to try his hand at illustration, supplied the cover art and several line vignettes. One imagines that Sendak's parents were very happy to hear about his Seven Stories gig. Sendak was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, to Polish Jewish parents. As a child, he was keenly aware of what was happening in Europe during the Second World War. Much of his mother's family had emigrated and been saved from the Holocaust, but his father's family hadn't fared as well. It is said that as a teenager, Sendak pored over old photographs of his lost relatives. He told the New York Times in 2006, 'The Holocaust has run like a river of blood through all my books...' The fact that one of his first real paying jobs as an artist was a series of pamphlets for the ADL cannot be surprising in this context" (Rebecca Rego Barry, Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fantastic Finds in Unlikely Places, 2018, pp. 88-89). Institutionally uncommon: WorldCat locates sets at only seven international holdings (all in the US); none listed on Library Hub among British and Irish institutional libraries.

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