Jack and Jill by Louisa May Alcott, Junior Deluxe Editions, Ruth Ives Illustrations, 1957

The Piece

Louisa May Alcott's Jack and Jill in the Junior Deluxe Editions printing of 1957, the mid-century children's classic in the binding a generation of American children remembers: pale pictorial boards printed in turquoise and black with a sledding scene of the two friends on the front, the title in a scalloped cartouche, and a mint green cloth spine lettered with the title, the author and the series name. The endpapers are a field of small turquoise vignettes, sleds, skates, a stage, a ship, a castle, children at play, and the book opens to a full-color frontispiece of children on a riverbank by a rowboat, with the text set in a generous face and broken by line drawings in the chapters, a playlet with a dragon, a woman with a parasol on a windy beach, in the manner of the period. The dedication page carries Alcott's own 1880 inscription to the schoolmates of Ellsworth Devens, and the copyright page the illustrations copyright of MCMLVII to Nelson Doubleday.

Condition is very good: the boards bright and clean with light rubbing at the corners, the green cloth spine unfaded and square, the hinges sound, the frontispiece and endpapers clean, the text block tight and the pages lightly toned with no writing, tears or marks found. Issued without a dust jacket.

History & Provenance

Jack and Jill: A Village Story was published in 1880, when Alcott was at the height of her fame and twelve years past Little Women. It is her Concord book, set in a thinly disguised version of the town, and it began with a real accident: a coasting crash on a Concord hill in which Ellsworth Devens, a schoolboy she knew, was badly hurt and later died, and to whose schoolmates she dedicated the novel. Out of it she made a story of two friends, Jack Minot and Janey Pecq, who go over the bank on a sled on the first page and spend the winter recovering, and of the village of children around them, their theatricals, their clubs, their quarrels and their growing up; it is the most autobiographical of her children's books after Little Women and the one in which Concord itself is the subject.

Junior Deluxe Editions was the children's book club of Nelson Doubleday, the mail-order arm of the Doubleday house that also ran the Literary Guild. From the late 1940s into the 1960s it sent subscribers a classic a month, newly illustrated, in sturdy pictorial bindings designed to survive a childhood, at a price a postwar family could manage, and the series put Alcott, Twain, Stevenson, Kipling and Sewell on the bedroom shelves of the baby boom in editions that are now collected for their illustration and their color. This Jack and Jill was illustrated for the club by Ruth Ives, whose turquoise and black cover and endpaper vignettes give it its look. The dating rests on the imprint rather than style alone: the illustrations copyright page dated MCMLVII, 1957, and the Junior Deluxe Editions binding date the book to 1957.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A turquoise and green Alcott is the book that brightens a shelf of brown spines and the one that gets read aloud. It belongs in a child's room, a guest room, a cottage bookcase or a stack on a nursery dresser, and it holds its own on an adult shelf among the Junior Deluxe Editions and the mid-century picture books that designers now collect for color. It is a gift for a reader of eight or eighty, for anyone who loved Little Women, for a Concord family or a new baby's first library. For a shop or designer client it is the bright, inexpensive, period hardcover that styles a children's vignette and sells on the cover.