BAWDEN, Edward (1903-89, illustrator). Life in an English Village, London, "The King Penguin Books" [No. 51], 1949, 8vo, 16 full-page coloured lithographed illustrations by Bawden, original decorated paper boards. FIRST EDITION, SIGNED BY THE ARTIST.

BAWDEN Edward (1903-89, illustrator).  Life in An English Village. Sixteen Lithographs by Edward Bawden with an Introductory Essay by Noel Carrington. London: "The King Penguin Books" [No. 51], 1949. 8vo (180 x 122mm). Half title, 16 full-page coloured lithographed illustrations by Edward Bawden at the end, 6 full-page woodcut illustrations by the same artist. Original paper boards decorated in black and grey, without a dust-jacket, as issued (some minor splitting at hinges). Provenance: Joyce Walker (later signature on front free endpaper); with a bookseller's note in pencil suggesting the book has been "recently" signed by the artist, and possibly in old-age. FIRST EDITION, SIGNED BY THE ARTIST at the foot of the title. "The coloured illustrations in this book are from drawings made by the artist directly on to lithographed zinc plates. They are therefore originals and not reproductions of drawings made on paper" (publisher's printed note beneath the list of plates). The illustrations are of the village of Great Bardfield in Essex, where Bawden lived among a community of artists, including Eric Ravilious and Michael Rothenstein, in the mid-20th-century. "Bawden's lithographs [for Life in an English Village] are not quaint or crooked. They are full of people doing things: pouring pints, queuing in shops, sweeping the church, repairing machinery, mending shoes, cutting meat, going to school. This is not a village seen from the outside as a tourist, hoping that people will get out of the way of the photograph. These pictures are all of working interiors. For most of his life Bawden lived in Great Bardfield, and found all that he needed there. J. I. M. Richards admired his ability 'to find inexhaustible subjects to paint simply by looking in a new direction down his own village street.' These busy lithographs for Life in an English Village were Bawden's tribute to that familiar street and its inexhaustibility" (Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns (2010), p.192).