Slimtails Friends

Slimtail?s Friends (1942) by Mary Chell. A. & C. Black. No ISBN. Condition: Poor. There was a time when children?s books did not require talking dragons, intergalactic academies or morally conflicted teenage wizards. Sometimes all that was needed was a mouse, a bird, a handful of woodland companions and the quiet confidence that small adventures could be every bit as exciting as saving the universe. Slimtail?s Friends comes from that gentler tradition. Written and illustrated by Mary Chell and published during the extraordinary year of 1942 , this little volume offered children a pocket-sized escape into a world where animals wore aprons with complete sincerity, friendship solved most difficulties and life proceeded at a pace that modern readers may find almost medically calming. The cover alone deserves admiration. Against its now well-earned green cloth stands a delightfully earnest gathering of animal companions, all appearing to be engaged in some important social engagement involving a small suitcase or parcel. One suspects tea cannot be far away. British children?s literature has always excelled at giving woodland creatures remarkably busy social calendars. Being a wartime publication adds another layer of fascination. While much of the world was occupied with rather larger concerns, publishers continued producing books that reminded children of kindness, imagination and ordinary happiness. There is something quietly moving about that. Even amid uncertainty, stories still mattered. Now, honesty compels us to mention that this particular copy has not reached us directly from an aristocratic library where it spent eighty years resting on velvet cushions. Quite the opposite. It has clearly been loved. Perhaps very loved. The condition is graded Poor , although the book remains perfectly sound. The cloth covers have acquired a fair amount of staining and wear that only decades of handling can produce. A previous young owner has thoughtfully coloured in a couple of the illustrations using pencil?an artistic collaboration that Mary Chell probably hadn?t anticipated but may have secretly appreciated. More ambitiously still, the inside front cover has been decorated with an original drawing by one of its former custodians. Publishers rarely include blank pages without some child eventually deciding to improve them. Purists may wince. Collectors of immaculate first editions may reach gently for the smelling salts. But there is another way of looking at such things. Children?s books were never really intended to spend their lives sealed in acid-free wrappers, admired only through archival gloves. They were meant to be read in bedrooms, carried downstairs, left on chairs, shown to friends, coloured in despite explicit instructions not to, and occasionally transformed into impromptu sketchbooks by young imaginations operating under the perfectly reasonable assumption that every empty page represented an opportunity. In that sense, this copy has fulfilled its purpose magnificently. The added pencil colouring and youthful artwork are not damage so much as archaeological evidence. They tell us that somewhere, many decades ago, a child found Slimtail and his companions interesting enough to become part of the story. There is something wonderfully human about that. Books have biographies too, and this one has clearly lived a fuller life than most. From Crappy Old Books ?because not every old book needs to be pristine to be precious. Some arrive polished and immaculate, having survived the twentieth century with scarcely a fingerprint. Others, like this charming little survivor, arrive carrying the fingerprints, pencil marks and artistic ambitions of generations past. It may not satisfy the perfectionist, but it has something arguably rarer: evidence that it did exactly what it was printed to do. It found a child, sparked an imagination, and lived happily ever after?albeit with a few extra pencil lines along the way.…