If
Garden City: Doubleday Page and Company, (1910). First separate edition. Leather over thin boards. Oblong sixteenmo. [16] pages.
This is the first separate appearance of Kipling's most famous poem, "If", which had been published about a month earlier in the book "Rewards and Fairies." The poem achieved immediate, immense, and lasting popularity. It is a superb literary example of Victorian-era stoicism and quickly came to embody the English "stiff upper lip."
Doubleday and Page quickly published "If" separately in this booklet format as well as a broadside, probably to forestall pirated uses in the U.S. The first separate edition of the poem in Great Britain was published four years later as a leaflet by Macmillan.
Printed on 8 double-folded leaves with green ornamental borders to each page. Uncommon in the deluxe gilt-stamped green Morocco binding (Richards binding (i)).
Ref. RICHARDS A244.
Bound in dark green leather over thin boards with gilt titling and border ornaments to upper board. Some chipping to leather at board extremities, rubs to board edges. Cracking to leather along upper joint, board holding. Interior clean and sound.
Item #1709
Sold