LAMB, Charles & Mary (author). Arthur RACKHAM (illustrator). Tales From Shakespeare. London J.M. Dent & Co. 1909

Large 8vo.; publisher’s pale minty-green moiré cloth pictorially blocked in gilt to spine and upper cover, top edges gilt, others olivine, pictorial fairy endpapers; pp. xii + 304; with pictorial title in sepia and dark green, with 12 fine coloured plates including frontispiece, with original protective tissue, and numerous black-and-white illustrations printed as full-page plates and chapter-headings; externally fine, a lovely copy, internally very bright and clean with some offset browning to endpapers and a little speckling to the fore-edge of the book block, beneath the olivine edges; increasingly scarce in this condition.

First edition illustrated by Rackham: the true first, not the later Temple Press edition which bears the same date.  

Described as an ‘evergreen’ book, the Lambs’ adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays for children became a best seller on first publication in 1807 and the work has since become a children’s classic.   The work is an unsurpassed rendering of Shakespeare’s plays in prose form for children.