RICHARDS, Laura E.
The Hurdy Gurdy.
FIRST EDITION. Illustrated by Jo J. Mora. Boston: Dana Estes & Company, 1902.
Oblong duodecimo (about 6¾ × 8 inches). 99 pp. Illustrated throughout with full-page and in-text black-and-white drawings by Jo Mora. Publisher's gray cloth, the spine and front cover decorated in blue and red, the cover design monogrammed "J.W.R."; red pictorial endpapers. Grandeau & Shorts A4. A very good copy, with light wear to the extremities, a previous-owner name, and the front endpaper partially separating along the hinge. Two first printings of this title are recorded with no established precedence — this oblong duodecimo with black-and-white illustrations, and a larger octavo with color-monochrome illustrations.
An early-career book by the illustrator Jo Mora, much later celebrated for his Monterey Peninsula work and his pictorial maps of California and the West. This is his third Dana Estes commission in three years, following The Animals of Aesop (1900) and Reynard the Fox (1901), and the lively figure work and decorative borders already foreshadow the California work to come.
The author, Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards (1850–1943), was among the most prolific American writers of children's books of her generation, with more than ninety titles to her name. She was the daughter of Julia Ward Howe, who wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and of the educator and reformer Samuel Gridley Howe; in 1917 she and her sisters Maud Howe Elliott and Florence Howe Hall won the first Pulitzer Prize for Biography ever awarded, for their life of their mother, Julia Ward Howe, 1819–1910 — the sisters also being among the first women to receive a Pulitzer. The Hurdy Gurdy belongs to her busy early-1900s run of children's books.
SKU TO-2026-122
