MORA, J. J. (illustrator).
Reynard the Fox.
FIRST EDITION. Boston: Dana Estes & Company, 1901.
Octavo. xi, 186 pp. Illustrated throughout by Jo Mora: twenty-four full-page drawings in monotone (including the frontispiece), with black-and-white in-text vignettes and head- and tailpieces. Publisher's yellow-tan cloth, the spine and front board decorated with an orange fox and lettered in black, an orange fox cub stamped to the rear board. Grandeau & Shorts A2. A very good copy, with darkening to the boards, light wear to the extremities, two previous-owner names, small tape residue inside the covers, and the front hinge lightly cracked.
An early book of the illustrator Jo Mora, much later celebrated for his Monterey Peninsula work and his pictorial maps of California and the West. Reynard the Fox is among the earliest substantial book commissions he carried — his second for Dana Estes, following The Animals of Aesop the year before — and already shows the lively animal draftsmanship the California work would build on. The text retells the old beast-fable of Reynard, the sly fox who outwits lion, wolf, and bear alike — a trickster tradition that ran through medieval French, Dutch, and German versions for centuries. An attractive early-Mora book with genuine appeal for the illustration collector.
SKU TO-2026-123
