MORRIS, James. Illustrated by Pauline BAYNES. The Upstairs Donkey & Other Stolen Stories. London, Faber & Faber, 1962.
8vo. Publisher's yellow cloth, spine lettered in red, upper board ornamented in red; in the original pictorial dust-wrapper (not price-clipped); pp. [vi], 127; illustrated plates throughout; spine lightly sunned; slight rubbing to extremities; internal tear to lower panel of wrapper; slight chipping to top and bottom edges of spine; minimal spotting to edges, else bright and clean internally, a very good copy of this scarce Morris collection in the wrapper.
First UK edition. This collection of short stories comes from sources across the globe. During Morris's time travelling the world as a foreign correspondent, she collected a whole host of interesting folk tales from a multitude of cultures, and presents a selection of them here, in The Upstairs Donkey. 'Wherever my work as a newspaper correspondent has taken me, I have filched local tales and legends, concentrating upon more the subtle and sophistocated kind of anecdote, and fighting shy of the whimsier folklore' (p. 7). This volume features wonderful full-page illustrations by Pauline Baynes throughout.
In an article written about finding and collecting Morris's entire published collection, biographer Paul Clements comments 'Morris also wrote a little known children's book called The Upstairs Donkey for which I searched far and wide. This is a collection of folk tales published in 1962 [in the UK], and is a bibliographical rarity … This slim volume, with its yellow cover featuring illustrations by Pauline Baynes, seems somewhat incongruous sitting amongst Morris's classic works' (Paul Clements, Tracking Down The Upstairs Donkey, published in the Welsh magazine Planet in 2001).
COPAC located copies (some dated 1962) in the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, at Oxford and Trinity, Dublin; not in the National Library of Wales.
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