Harold and the North Pole: A Christmas Journey with the Purple Crayon. by Johnson, Crockett - 1958

New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958. First edition of the fourth book in the author's beloved series. 16mo, original cloth, illustrated. Fine in a very good price-clipped dust jacket. Scarce in the original dust jacket. Crockett Johnson-a pen name for David Johnson Liesk-was "a cartoonist whose simplest, sparest and boldest outlines produced unforgettable, gently humorous and always endearing caricatures... His natural gift for drawing and writing from a young child's viewpoint enabled him to craft more than 20 juvenile books," including this, his most popular one. "With the fewest of lines, Johnson depicts Harold as a toddler clad in sleepers, his chubby hand gripping a fat plum-colored crayon. From page to page, the thick, firm, purple mark delineates Harold's actions against the stark white background so effectively and ingeniously that the crayon is as much a character as Harold. The same economy that informs Johnson's art permeates his text; he writes so concisely of Harold's moonlight stroll that his style perfectly echoes the clarity of his boldly outlined cartoon illustrations" (Silvey, 355).