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Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 2,500
Wiggin, Kate Douglas (1856-1923) & Nora Smith (1859-1934) The Arabian Nights, their Best-Known Tales.
London: T. Werner Laurie, n.d. [ca. 1909].
Deluxe limited edition, quarto; illustrated with 12 tipped-in color plates by Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966) mounted on gray cardstock, original tissue guards with printed captions nicely preserved; bound in original full limp vellum, decorated in gilt, with yapp edges, pictorial endpapers, top edge gilt, mauve silk ties intact (evidence of effaced gold tooling to front panel, likely added and then scratched off by a former owner or two, slight waving; scattered minor spots and stains); 9 3/8 x 7 1/4 in.
Kate Douglas Wiggin and her sister Nora Smith were both prolific children's and adult fiction writers who worked individually and as collaborators for much of the late 19th century. Wiggin founded and taught at the first free kindergarten in California. She and Smith would eventually launch more than fifty similar schools in San Francisco and Oakland. After her marriage, Wiggin gave up teaching and focused on lecturing and writing. Her most famous work, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, was adapted for the screen.
(See Charles Wells Moulton's A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred Seventy Biographical Sketches, Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women, in all Walks of Life, edited by Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore (1893), pp. 771-772.)
