ANIMALS OF THE BIBLE: A PICTURE BOOK; (Very First Caldecott Award Winner)

NEW YORK: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1937. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good in Good Plus Dustjacket. Quarto. Green cloth-covered boards (10 1/4" x 7 7/8") with still-bright gilt lettering and image of resting lamb to front board, and as well, bright lettering to spine. First printing, in first state dustjacket (Author's name misspelled on spines of both dustjacket and book as "Lathop"). $2.00 price present on inside flap of dustjacket. Small chips to top and bottom of dustjacket spine and tiny chip to tops/bottoms of seam at flaps. Dustjacket shows sunning, and a horizontal crack, some minor nicks and scritches.

Book itself shows very light wear to spine extremities, and just a wee bit of spotting and toning to both endpapers. Single small deaccession library stamp to front pastedown, and a very small spot to top edge.

Thirty superb black-and-white drawings by Dorothy Lathrop "presenting the most memorable animals of the old and new testaments...beautiful double pages of The Creation, Noah's Ark, Daniel's Lions, Isaiah's Peaceable Kingdom..." and other scenes.
Text selected by Helen Dean Fish from the King James Bible. Decorated endpapers with running fawns, above a bush with nearby running bunny.

Dorothy P. Lathrop's ANIMALS OF THE BIBLE was the very first book ever to receive the Caldecott Medal, a distinguished accolade successively granted to such illustrated children's classics as Virginia Lee Burton's "The LIttle House", James Thurber's "Many Moons", Robert McCloskey's "Make Way For Ducklings", and Ludwig Bemelman's "Madeline's Rescue", and Maurice Sendak's "Where The Wild Things Are".

Elusive first Caldecott offering, as the first in the long series of award winners, and particularly so, in this condition, in such a lovely jacket.