When We Were Very Young. by MILNE, A. A - 1924

London: Methuen & Co.,, 1924. Octavo. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, gilt vignettes to the covers, top edge gilt. With the dust jacket. Illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard. Spine gently rolled and a little toned, very slight rubbing to extremities, light offsetting to endpapers, an excellent copy in the unusually bright jacket with browned spine, faint foxing to panels, tiny nicks to extremities with very minor chips to spine ends. First edition, first impression. Presentation copy, inscribed by the illustrator on the front free endpaper, "To Aunt Fanny, with love from Ernest, Xmas 1924". Shepard was very close to his aunts; his mother had died when he was ten, after which his aunts helped to raise him, taking him and his siblings on many trips. Shepard described Fanny as "the energetic one" and "chief organiser" of the family in his autobiography Drawn From Memory (1957), recalling fondly a story of her visit to the Jubilee illuminations, "in spite of Aunt Alicia's protests and warnings". This copy has been in the family by descent since the presentation. When We Were Very Young is the first and the scarcest of the four Pooh books with an initial print run of 5,175 regular trade copies. It was first published in London on 6 November 1924 to immense acclaim, and the first printing sold out in one day. By the end of the year more than 53,000 copies had been printed of what The Times called "the greatest children's book since Alice" (Thwaite p. 286). This copy is in the second state of the first impression, with the page number ix present in the preliminaries. In copies of the first state the contents ix is unnumbered.