Thursday 11 February 2010

Delightful

Here's a lovely old book I found.




It's a bit battered, but has wonderfully thick creamy paper.






and I think has been well-loved.





John Masefield was a poet who is now unfashionable, but he had a real gift for chantable verse and for telling good stories. He wrote two magical books for children, The Midnight Folk and this one, The Box of Delights. I think I can see his influence in Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising.

There is a affectionate account of his work here, and a rather more cautious one here - he is VERY unfashionable after all. He wrote well about the sea and sailing, being a working sailor himself .




2 comments:

ZEUS said...

wow those illustrations are cool, nice find!

Elizabeth said...

I went & looked in the book to find who illustrated it, but no name is give. Very slack of William Heinemann Ltd. in 1935!