Histoire de Babar, le petit Éléphant
Price: $200.00
Hard Cover. Paris: Editions du Jardin des Modes, 1931. First Edition. Good.
First edition, first issue, with no elephant logo to copyright page. Publisher's blue cloth backstrip, with orange and yellow paper-covered boards, an illustration of Babar to front board, and black lettering. Good, with some toning to spine and front board, considerable scratching and soiling to boards, some loss and tears to foot of spine, bottom corners of boards heavily bumped and rubbed to boards, reinforcement strip of paper to gutter of pp. 40-41, and light occasional spotting to pages. Overall, a good copy of the very first Babar book. Histoire de Babar originated from a bedtime story that Jean de Brunhoff's wife, Cécile, told their children, Mathieu and Laurent. In the book, Babar's mother is killed by hunters in the jungle and Babar escapes and winds up in Paris. There he purchases a dapper outfit and becomes civilized. He returns to the jungle just as the king of the elephants dies from eating a poisoned mushroom and is elected their new king. Jean de Brunhoff continued writing Babar books until his untimely death in 1937, at which point his son, Laurent, took up the mantle. Interestingly, Histoire de Babar was the first non-fashion book published by Editions du Jardin des Modes, a subsidiary of Condé Nast. Item #JDB003
