HUXLEY, Aldous (author). Barbara COONEY (illustrator). The Crows of Pearblossom. London; Chatto & Windus. 1967

Large 8vo. Original turquoise linson boards lettered in white to spine and decorated with a vignette of a crow in black to upper cover, decorative egg endpapers, in bright green pictorial dustwrapper; pp. [40]; illustrated throughout in green and black; a very fine, unread, copy protected by an equally fine, unclipped, dustwrapper (16/-, 80p).

First U.K. edition; published simultaneously by Random House in the U.S. with the same illustrations.

This is the only juvenile title by the author of “Brave New World”, and is a lighthearted and silly tale written for his young niece, Olivia de Haulleville in the Christmas holidays of 1944, when the author was living near a small Mojave desert hub called Pearblossom, north east of Los Angeles.  Adults, though, love it for its uncompromising idiosyncratic humour and unusual desert setting.

The original manuscript was lost in a house fire, however Huxley’s neighbours, the Yosts, had made a copy at the time and the work was therefore rediscovered in the 1960s.