Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills, Doubleday Page Green Cloth, Top Edge Gilt, 1906

The Piece

Rudyard Kipling's first book of stories, Plain Tales from the Hills, in the Doubleday, Page and Company revised edition of 1906, with the biographical sketch by Charles Eliot Norton. The volume is bound in Doubleday's dark green ribbed cloth, the front board stamped in black with a lateen-rigged dhow under sail on a ruled sea within a double rule border, the title and author lettered in gilt in the squared Arts and Crafts face the house used for its Kipling volumes, and the spine lettered in gilt with the title, a small black stamped device and the author's name. The edges of the leaves are gilt at the head, and the text is printed on laid paper by the Norwood Press of J. S. Cushing and Berwick and Smith in Norwood, Massachusetts. The title page is set within a red and black double rule frame in three compartments, the half-title verso carries Kipling's own publisher's device of the period, an elephant's head and a swastika in a circle over his facsimile signature, and the copyright page reads Revised, April, 1899, Copyright 1899 by Rudyard Kipling, with the dedication To the Wittiest Woman in India on the leaf that follows.

The book is a sound, square, complete copy with honest shelf wear. The gilt on the boards and spine is bright and the black stamping of the dhow is sharp. The cloth is rubbed at the corners and the spine ends, with the head of the spine frayed and a small chip of cloth gone there, and the tail worn through at the fold; there is an old ink scribble on the spine beside the stamped device. The gilt top edge is dulled and lightly soiled. Inside, the hinges are tender and the front hinge is starting at the title page, the leaves are clean, bright and unmarked, and the text block is tight. There is no dust jacket, as issued without one or long since lost.

History & Provenance

Plain Tales from the Hills was Kipling's first collection of fiction, forty stories of Anglo-Indian life in Simla and the plains, most of them written for the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore when he was a twenty-one-year-old sub-editor, and published in Calcutta in 1888. It made his name. The book reached America in a flood of pirated editions in the 1890s, and in 1899 Doubleday and McClure, with the author's cooperation, issued the first authorized American text, revised by Kipling himself in April of that year and prefaced with the sketch of his life by Charles Eliot Norton, the Harvard professor who was his friend and champion. Doubleday, Page and Company kept that revised text in print for decades in its dark green dhow binding, and the 1906 printing offered here belongs to the first years of that run, when Kipling was at the height of his fame and about to receive the Nobel Prize.

The device on the half-title verso needs a word. Kipling took the swastika from India, where it is an ancient emblem of good fortune, and used it with an elephant's head and lotus as his personal mark on the bindings and title pages of his books from the 1890s until the early 1930s. When the symbol was appropriated by the Nazi party he had it removed from all his books, and it does not appear on Kipling volumes printed after about 1933. Its presence here is a mark of the book's date, nothing more, and it is the ordinary form found on every Doubleday Kipling of the period.

The book is dated on its title page and its copyright page, and the printing is attributed to the Norwood Press by the colophon. No ownership inscription is present.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is a reading copy of a classic in a binding good enough to shelve face out. The dark green cloth with the black dhow and the bright gilt lettering is one of the handsome trade bindings of the Edwardian years, and it sits well in a row of green and gilt spines, on a nightstand stack or on a desk beside brass and leather. The stories inside are short, sharp and still funny, the best introduction to Kipling there is, and the book makes a natural gift for a reader, a traveler or anyone with a connection to India. For a shop or designer client it is the authentic decorative antique book that styles a shelf and sells on its cover.