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135 SHANGHAI. Hotel Metropole Guide to Shanghai. Shanghai: [Oriental Press, 1903] one of the earliest known shanghai guidebooks First edition, genuinely rare in commerce, of this early tourist guide to the “Paris of the East”, provided free by the Hotel Metropole on Bubbling Well Road. We can trace nine institutional copies, with none in the UK. The Hotel Metropole boasted that it offered tourists and business travellers an escape “from the bustle and din of the City, and more particularly from the weirdly unpleasant noises and antique odours” (p. 17). It offered the services of a resident barber, a bar stocked with champagne, beer, and cocktails, 75 bedrooms, and livery stables. This guide offers a valuable perspective on late Qing Shanghai, before the transformations of the 1920s and 1930s, through many charming period advertisements. Octavo. Original blue cloth, front cover lettered in black, advertisement endpapers. With 3 folding tables of rates and tariffs, map of Shanghai unfolding to 443 × 530 mm, 2 colour labels advertising bottled water pasted in, illustrations and advertisements in text. Covers soiled, webbing exposed at p. i, binding remaining firm, clean internally with a little creasing and cockling, a few small closed tears, illustrations bright, map torn at stub but not intruding over the neatline. A very good copy. £2,250 [158263]
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136 SHEPARD, Ernest H. (illus.); GRAHAME, Kenneth. The Wind in the Willows. London: Methuen & Co., 1931 signed by both author and illustrator Signed limited edition, number 192 of 200 large paper copies signed by both Grahame and Shepard, printed on handmade paper. Grahame’s children’s classic was originally published in 1908 with only a frontispiece for an illustration. Although the work was subsequently
published with illustrations by several artists, it was Shepard who brought the narrative to life with his evocative line drawings. Well-known for his illustrations of A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh series, Shepard was asked to illustrate a new edition, following Milne’s popular adaptation of the book for the stage as Toad of Toad Hall . In 1931 Shepard visited Grahame at his house in Pangbourne to make sketches, and at their first meeting Grahame said to him, “I love these little people, be kind to them”. Small quarto. Original green cloth-backed grey paper covered boards, paper spine label lettered in black, edges
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CHRISTMAS 2022
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