Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse by Anna Sewell - 1954

Garden City, NY: Junior Deluxe Editions/Nelson-Doubleday Inc., 1954 Junior Deluxe Editions/Nelson-Doubleday Inc., Garden City, NY. c1954. Hardcover. Edition/Printing not stated. Book is tight, square, and unmarked. Book Condition: Good +; light bumping and shelfwear to head, tail, and tips; light soiling to boards. No DJ. Gray boards with green overlay on the spine; gilt lettering on spine with horse and tree decorations; black lettering on front and rear boards with black and rainbow effect horses. Brown multi-charactered endpapers. Tinted textblock top. Clean internals. Interior hinges are sound and not split. 224 pp 8vo. This book is an 1877 novel that has been in continuous print since then. This book is usually looked at as a children's novel, but Sewell did not write the novel for children. She said that her purpose in writing the novel was "to induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses—an influence she attributed to an essay on animals she read earlier. The story is narrated in the first person as an autobiographical memoir told by Black Beauty—beginning with his carefree days as a foal on an English farm with his mother, to his difficult life pulling cabs in London, to his happy retirement in the country. Along the way, he meets with many hardships and recounts many tales of cruelty and kindness. Each short chapter recounts an incident in Black Beauty's life containing a lesson or moral typically related to the kindness, sympathy, and understanding treatment of horses. A clean very presentable copy.