Originally written as bedtime stories and letters addressed to Grahame’s only child, a sickly boy named Alastair and nicknamed ‘Mouse’, the book was rejected by Grahame’s publisher The Bodley Head and eventually taken up by Methuen, albeit without advance payment, ‘such was the firm’s lack of confidence in the book’ (ODNB).
‘After the publication of The Wind in the Willows by Methuen in 1908, it found an unlikely transatlantic fan in US president Theodore Roosevelt who, in 1909, wrote to Grahame to tell him that he had ‘read it and reread it, and have come to accept the characters as old friends’. Elsewhere, the critical response was more mixed, and it was not until AA Milne adapted parts of the book into a popular stage version, Toad of Toad Hall, in 1929, that it became established as the evergreen children’s classic it is known as today’ (The Guardian).
A very good copy, with some wear to the cloth, especially to the head and tail of spine and the joints, spine a little rubbed and faded, top edge a little worn, some marks to the rear cover, offsetting and spotting to the endpapers.
