Puck's Yule Faggot. A Selection from Puck's Post-Bag for 1873 & 1874, Winchester, "James Pamplin, High Street," 1875, 8vo, hand-coloured title and 5 plates, contemporary cloth. RARE. Please see footnote below.

Puck's Yule Faggot. A Selection from Puck's Post-Bag for 1873 & 1874. Winchester: "James Pamplin, High Street," 1875. 8vo (180 x 121mm). 8vo (180 x 120mm). Additional hand-coloured title [?partly drawn by hand] but with imprint "Cowell Anastatic Press, Ipswich" and signed "Cobweb & Clericorn", with 5 further hand-coloured original drawings, or drawings on a print base, one laid down, 2 full-page, signed and/or titled variously 1) "Contents" signed by "Cobweb", 2) "The Hidden Meanings of our Nursery Rhymes by Cobweb" signed by "Pixie", 3) "Tender and True by [illegible word]" signed by "Pixie", 4) "A Costume for whose who go in for the Water Cure by Pixie" signed by "Pixie" and 5) "A Picture Proverb by Cobweb" signed by "Cobweb." Contemporary pebbled boards with black label mounted on upper cover, terracotta endpapers (gilt-lettering rubbed away from label). Provenance: "S. Shirley (Moonbeam), Oct. 1875" (inscription on front free endpaper); some minor contemporary annotation. The whole publication - a disarming ragbag of correspondence, poetry, acrostics, anagrams and other word games - seems like an invention of Lewis Carroll, except it makes less sense. Its purported intention was to elucidate, through the publication of a series of letters from various local correspondents ("Linnaeus Grubweed," "Sir Cato Bloodblock," "Miss Cynthia New-Moon," etc.), the meaning of the nursery rhyme "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe ..." FIRST EDITION. RARE.