THE KNAVE OF HEARTS. With Pictures by Maxfield Parrish

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925. First edition and the best issue bound in cloth and oversized. Decorated with a beautiful colourplate pictorial cover, stunning pictorial endleaves and a profusion of very fine colour illustrations throughout by Maxfield Parrish. 4to, (350 x 295 mm), publisher’s original black cloth with the full size pictorial colour pastedown on the upper cover, and colour illustrated endpapers. (47) pp. A handsome copy with the head and tail of the spine in very nice condition, some minor mellowing to the black cloth and pastedown and some bumping to the corners, otherwise very bright and clean and well preserved. THE FIRST EDITION OF THIS BRILLIANT ILLUSTRATED BOOK. Perhaps Parrish's best work, and certainly a very scarce book in nice condition. As Parrish himself said, "The reason I wanted to illustrate THE KNAVE OF HEARTS was on account of the bully opportunity it gives for a very good time making the pictures. Imagination could run riot, bound down by no period, just good fun and all sorts of things." Quoted in Ludwig, p. 48.
For sixty-five years Parrish worked in widely varied fields---book illustration, magazine illustration, posters and advertisements, paintings and murals---rendering realm of the imagination with sharp-focus realism. So well known and popular was his work F. Scott Fitzgerald , for example, described the reflection in a restaurant window as being the color of ‘Maxfield Parrish moonlight.’