The Colt from Moon Mountain

New York: Macmillan, 1941. First edition of this magical tale of a woodland colt who grows into a unicorn, inscribed by award-winning children’s author Dorothy Lathrop. The book follows a young girl as she bonds with the elusive creature: “Never had she had so lovely or tantalizing a pet. It was hers and it was not hers at all.” As an illustrator, Lathrop won the Newbery Award for Rachel Field’s Hitty, Her First Hundred Years (1929), and the inaugural Caldecott Medal for Helen Dean Fish's Animals of the Bible (1937). Lathrop inscribed this copy of The Colt from Moon Mountain shortly after publication for the wife of prominent American entomologist Edward Oliver Essig. A near-fine first edition by an artist who “loves animals and draws them with exquisite perfection,” very scarce inscribed. Single volume, measuring 8.5 x 7 inches: [62]. Original orange pictorial cloth stamped in white, pictorial endpapers, original color pictorial dust jacket with $1.75 price, front flap clipped at lower corner. Frontispiece, nine full-page illustrations, and four smaller illustrations in text. Inscribed on verso of front free endpaper: “For Mrs. E.O. Essig / With all good wishes / Dorothy P. Lathrop / 1942.” Light wear and toning to extremities of jacket, a few cellotape reinforcements to verso. (Inventory #: 1004101)