The Little House

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942. First Edition. Square Octavo. 40 pages. The very scarce first edition with the $1.75 on the dust jacket. Listed as an "R" in the Library of Congress Rare Children's Book section. The Little House is the story of a house that is swallowed up by a growing city but is rescued in the end by being moved to the country. Like the machine-heroines in her other books, the house has human characteristics and feelings such as curiosity, loneliness, fear, and happiness--feelings with which children can identify. Upon winning the Caldecott Award for this book Virginia Lee Burton wrote that her key is not to write down to children, "they sense adult condescension in a moment, and they turn from it." Anne Tyler lists this as the one that introduced her to "the realization of the losses that the passage of time can bring." As a child, she liked the book's tone" quiet but rhythmic"; as an adult, the illustrations "spelled out for me all the successive stages [of time]; the sun rises and sets across one entire page and a whole month of moons wheel across another." Bound in light blue pictorial cloth with accents in white, spine plain, pictorial endpapers, in color pictorial dust jacket with the Caldecott to the front panel(these stickers were often not put on until the second printing but owners could get one for their book from either the bookseller or library) A few closed tears and chipping with old tape mends to verso of the jacket, two small damp stains to rear panel, previous owner's gift inscription in pencil dated 1943. A very good copy of this scarce children's book.