THE STORY ABOUT PING - 1933

New York: Viking, 1933. First printing. Fine in very good plus jacket.. First edition, in the scarce original dust jacket, about a little Chinese duckling who lives on a houseboat in Peking. The prolific Wiese, runner-up for two Caldecott medals and winner of a Newbery, illustrator of Walter Brooks's Freddy the Pig books and Felix Salten's BAMBI, was at his best here: Flack's THE STORY ABOUT PING is an animal tale that draws great power from the young reader's anxious identification with the daily life-and-death routine of an animal on the borders of the human world. As Barbara Bader writes, "This was one of the first instances in picturebooks proper of a story being written by one person to be pictured by another"; though the author was herself an able artist, "Marjorie Flack didn't know China, Kurt Wiese did, that was the genesis; the ramifications were many." Very scarce. 9'' x 6.75''. Original quarter black cloth, paper pictorial boards. In original unclipped ($1.00) color pictorial dust jacket. Illustrated by Wiese with wonderful color lithographs (cw: caricatured depictions of Chinese people). [32] pages. Book with slightest bit of edge rubbing; jacket with two small closed tears repaired on verso and slight rubbing.