1943. First Edition Thus. 480 pages. No dust jacket. Green cloth. Black and white illustrations throughout. Book is in better condition than most examples of this age. Neat, clean, well bound pages with very minimal foxing, tanning and thumbing. Small inscriptions and neat labels may be present. Boards have mild shelf wear with light rubbing and corner bumping. Some light marking and sunning.
Edward Lear was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, who is known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to make illustrations of birds and animals; making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; and as a (minor) illustrator of Alfred Tennyson's poems. As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry.
Yes, I do indeed have the 1943 hardcover version. It looks like I absorbed this from my parents' collection, as it appears this copy comes from Foley's on Charing Cross in London. This collection has all of Lear's original illustrations, which are slightly disturbing looking, but since I grew up with this book as one of my standard childhood reads, I find the drawings to be completely normal looking. The book is primarily limericks, and lots of them. But there are some stories, and longer poems as well, and an alphabet with illustrations. A classic!