The work of a master storyteller, Kipling's tales are amongst the most inventive of all children's literature. With exquisite paintings and pen-and-ink illustrations by Niroot Puttapipat, this is the definitive collector's edition.

• Edition limited to 1,000 copies
• Introduction by Michael Morpurgo
• Vellum quarter-binding blocked in 22-carat gold with vellum tips and paper sides blocked in four metallic foils
• 14 illustrations, numerous borders and tailpieces, and pictorial endpapers by Niroot Puttapipat
• Gilded top edge
• Printed on Cordier Wove paper
• Presented in a cloth-bound solander box
• 204 pages
• Book size: 13" x 9¾"

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

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’.

‘Without this book it is unlikely that I would ever have become a reader, let alone a story-maker myself’
MICHAEL MORPURGO

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.

'I hope that the illustrations for Just So Stories will be my best work so far - partly because I enjoy the stories very much, but also because I feel that I've developed as an artist since the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám'
Niroot Puttapipat

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.