Milne and LeMair

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I discovered an edition of A.A. Milne’s A Gallery of Children with illustrations by Henriette Willibeek LeMair (Saida) – one of my favorite illustrators of the era. It was published in 1925 and is available from Project Gutenberg. I picked three illustrations from the book to include with this post…but follow the link to the book to find many more.

She was most active as an illustrator in the early 1900s. I posted about 4 books she illustrated back in August 2021.  It was a thrill to find another. According to her entry in Wikipedia, in 1920 she married and converted to Sufism…publishing sporadically thereafter.

A. A. Milne Books (and not Winnie-the-Pooh)

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I browsed 3 books written by A. A. Milne from the early 1920s available on Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive last month. They were all before the Winnie-the-Pooh books although two of them contain material that later became part of the books that made Milne famous.  

A Gallery of Children illustrated by H. Willebeek Le Mair (1925) is my favorite of the group because of the illustrator. I posted about 4 other books she illustrated by in August 2021; she’s one of my favorite illustrators of the early 1900s.

Once Upon a Time illustrated by Charles Robinson (1922) was written in 1915…before the birth of Christopher Robin at a time when ‘life was not very amusing.’ It was published at the end of 1917. Milne commented that ‘I am still finding it difficult to explain just what sort of book it is.’

When we were very young (1924) is dedicated to Christopher Robin Milne (or Billy Moon as he prefers to call himself). He was born in 1920. The Internet Archive book does not include illustrator’s name; the A. A. Milne entry in Wikipedia lists E.H. Shepard (Punch cartoonist).