TRAVERS, P.[AMELA L.[YNDON]

Mary Poppins. London, Gerald Howe, 1934. First English edition. Publisher's yellow cloth in the gray dust jacket with illustrations in yellow after Mary Shepard. 7 3/8 x 4 3/4 inches (18.75 x 12.25 cm); xii, 206, [2] pp., pictorial endpapers and 27 line illustrations (13 full-page) by Mary Shepard. The dust jacket with the five shilling price, rubbing to the spine folds, small loss to the head of the spine affecting the author's last initial, small chip to the head of the front panel and slightly larger loss and edge crease to the rear panel, the front panel of the jacket now separated at the fold with the spine, the cloth with a few specks of foxing, internally clean, in all a remarkably nice copy in the excessively rare jacket, completely unrestored. The

This, the first of the Mary Poppins books by P. L. Travers, had at its source an earlier short story featuring a character of that name published in a New Zealand newspaper in 1926, which in turn may have been rooted in stories that Travers told her sisters as a child. The book was an almost immediate success, and the illustrations by Mary Shepard (the daughter of E. H. Shepard, the illustrator of Winnie-the-Pooh and Wind in the Willows) have an enduring charm. Travers was an accomplished figure. Born in Australia, she had worked as an actress in her youth (Pamela Lyndon Travers was her stage name—she was born Helen Lyndon Goff), was a disciple of G. I. Gurdjeff and a pupil of Carl Jung, and had a deep and abiding interest in myth and folklore. Her relationship with the Disney version of her book was equivocal; it made her wealthy, but she disliked the animated sequences and was ambivalent about the music.

Please note that the jacket has now separated at the front fold between spine and front panel.