Cats at School by WAIN, Louis; WOODHOUSE, S. C

London: George Routledge & Sons, Limited, 1911. Rare Cats Meow the Three "R"s WAIN, Louis. WOODHOUSE, S. C. Cats at School. Illustrated in 21 Coloured Plates by Louis Wain. With Verses by S. C. Woodhouse, M.A. (Oxon). London: George Routledge & Sons, Limited, n.d. [1911]. First edition. Tall octavo. [2], 4-23, [1, blank] pp. With twenty full-page color plates, including frontispiece. Quarter green cloth over color pictorial, heavy-card stock boards. Some soiling to boards, upper corners creased. Otherwise, an excellent copy. No copies have come to auction within the last thirty-six years. OCLC/KVK record only three copies in library holdings worldwide. At the end of the nineteenth century, Louis Wain (1860-1939), the Edwardian cat artist who went mad, became a household name as an illustrator of cats, whom he depicted in all sorts of activities, from skating and playing cricket to driving motor cars, attending dances, and playing musical instruments. "He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves" (H.G. Wells). "From 1883, Wain began to draw cats as they had never been drawn before, cats in humorous guises, in human situations, but always beautifully handled...[a]lthough he was sometimes forced to draw dogs before he became well-known!" (Houfe, The Dictionary of British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists 1800-1914). Wood 36. Dale, p. 76.