Just So Stories

A spectacular limited edition of Rudyard Kipling’s celebrated fables

Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories are among the most inventive and original of all children’s fiction. Posing ingenious explanations of how animals acquired their characteristics and revelling in exuberant wordplay, they are the work of a master storyteller. Kipling began inventing stories about how leopards got their spots and camels their humps to entertain his children – in particular his eldest daughter, Josephine, who died in 1899 aged six. When he wrote down the stories for publication in 1902, he remembered her with the phrase ‘Best Beloved’.

This special limited edition includes all 12 iconic tales, as well as ‘The Tabu Tale’, whose excitable heroine, Taffy, is based on Josephine. In ‘The Beginning of the Armadilloes’, an unlikely alliance between a hedgehog and a tortoise leads to a new species. The Elephant’s Child, full of ‘’satiable curtiosity’, travels to the ‘great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River’ to find out what the Crocodile eats for dinner, and inadvertently returns home with a useful extension to his nose. In the course of these delightful fables,Kipling accommodates magic, God and natural selection – from the ‘Eldest Magician’ who got the Earth ready, to the Leopard who changes his fur to hide in the forest full of ‘patchy-blatchy shadows’.

‘Hear and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was, O my Best Beloved’
The Cat that Walked by Himself

Former Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo has written a playful and deeply affectionate introduction. He describes vivid memories of his mother - a RADA trained actress - performing the stories: ‘Kipling and my mother, between them, could make words laugh off the page.’ Indeed, few words swoop and dive and trip off the tongue as Kipling’s do. His stories abound with droll turns of phrase and sing-song repetitions, from the man who lived ‘cavily in a Cave’ to the ‘Superior Comestible’ that ‘smelt most sentimental’.

Though the Just So Stories were first published during the golden age of children's book illustration, no edition has attempted to illuminate Kipling's prose in the rich illustrative style that thrived in his day. For this edition, The Folio Society approached Niroot Puttapipat - a contemporary artist working in the tradition of great golden-age artists such as Edmund Dulac. He has created 14 exquisite paintings, which have been printed with gold borders and tipped in as colour plates. They are complemented by pictorial endpapers, and nine pen-and-ink tailpieces depicting the animals.

RUDYARD KIPLING was born in Bombay in 1865. He began writing poems and stories as a teenager. In 1892 he married Carrie Balestier, and it was at her family home in Vermont that he began to write Captains Courageous and The Jungle Book. They moved to England in 1896. Eleven years later, Kipling became the youngest, and the first English, writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1936 and was buried in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.

Read more about the life and work of Rudyard Kipling

A standard edition of Just So Stories
is also available to purchase.

Dear Reader

Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories were first published in 1902, just as the ‘golden age’ of book illustration was reaching its peak, when exotic books appeared in luxurious gift editions adorned with sumptuous paintings by one of the outstanding talents that flowered at that time. Intricate and richly coloured, they visualised the fantastical, magical imagery of fairy tales, fables and animal stories. Among these were Edmund Dulac’s illustrations for Stories from Hans Christian Andersen, Arthur Rackham’s for Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and Edward J. Detmold’s for The Arabian Nights and Aesop’s Fables. All helped to create books of such beauty that they were avidly snapped up by collectors.

Kipling’s A Song of the English and The Jungle Book appeared in splendid editions of this kind, illustrated by W. Heath Robinson and the Detmold twins respectively. But – despite the rich potential of their distinctive characters and whimsical settings – his Just So Stories never were. This omission seemed a golden opportunity. Determined to create an edition worthy to stand among these others, my thoughts turned to Niroot Puttapipat and his remarkable affinity with the great illustrators of that era.

Since his first commission for us in 2006, Niroot has created wonderful illustrations for a number of Folio editions – from the arresting silhouettes that enliven the Myths and Legends of Russia to his lyrical paintings for The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. He describes Rackham and Detmold as powerful influences – both stylistically and in their preoccupation with folk and fairy tales. The first book that fired his imagination as a child – and inspired an enduring interest in painting animals – was Aesop’s Fables. I need scarcely say that Niroot was delighted by the challenge of illustrating Just So Stories. Their characters, their themes and the golden-age treatment that we sought – all of these elements made him ideal for this undertaking.

Illustrations that echo a golden era

There are 14 paintings in this special edition – each printed separately on Art paper and tipped onto the text pages within a gold border. Some are well-known scenes, such as the Elephant’s Child wrestling with the Crocodile by the ‘great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River’. Others, like the picture of the Giraffe and the Zebra for ‘How the Leopard got his Spots’, are aspects that Niroot was particularly drawn to – in this case, because he enjoys drawing ungulates! Not that the Leopard himself has been passed over – as you can see, he has pride of place on the binding design.

Initially influenced by the line-work of Chinese artists, Niroot’s approach has developed over recent years. His illustrations for The Red Fairy Book began as ink drawings, painted over in watercolour. In The Rubáiyát, sepia gouache lines rest on top of the paint. For Just So Stories, Niroot adapted these techniques, using a fine Chinese brush to ink in a pencil sketch. To this he added layers of transparent watercolour glaze. The lines faded away beneath the accumulated colour, retaining a residual definition, but creating a softer effect. For the endpapers, Niroot has depicted a scene from his favourite story: ‘How the Camel got his Hump’. The dynamic tension between the animals in this tale is well expressed by the panoramic space provided by the endpapers – the work-shy Camel stands aloof in the Howling Desert, looking over at his dismayed fellow creatures, the Horse, the Dog and the Ox.

The definitive collector’s edition

This is the most elaborate of these special limited editions. Every detail has been carefully considered and created using the finest materials. Each volume is quarter-bound in vellum, the spine blocked in 22-carat gold. The binding vividly depicts the Leopard in four different metallic foils. Altogether we used six different paper types and worked with five printing houses, each with expertise in specific media and techniques. As you will see from the enclosed brochure, each copy also features a hand-printed etching of the Painted Jaguar, hand-numbered and signed by the artist. It has been tipped in by hand and set within a decorative gold border, with the adjacent page printed letterpress to achieve a harmonious typographic arrangement.

It was important to us to find an introducer who had a strong personal connection with the stories – someone who would reflect the nostalgia that so many people, myself included, feel for them. Former Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo expresses these sentiments beautifully in his introduction, with his abiding memories of hearing the book read aloud by his mother. Morpurgo has also said that without this experience, he would never have become a children’s writer himself – and anyone who has loved War Horse, Private Peaceful or any of Morpurgo’s many stories, knows how great a loss that would have been.

We knew that matching the beauty of The Rubáiyát, with its pairing of exotic prose and exquisite illustrations, was an ambitious goal. But we believe that this is what we have achieved with this special collector’s edition of Just So Stories.

The Rubáiyát was one of our fastest-selling limited editions, and we expect demand for Just So Stories to be equally high. The limitation is set at just 1,000, so I would encourage you to reserve your copy without delay.

Yours sincerely

Joe Whitlock Blundell
Production Director

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