This is such a beautiful book , I just had to share it with you. It was given to me recently by my friend Wendy who had shown me a copy of hers when she was here in the summer for an art day. I fell in love with the book, and well, she surprised me :) Thank you sweetie.The book is based on Beatrix Potter's journal and letters and is really well put together, so enchanting :)
This is part of the first two pages, where she starts writing her diary at age 16, this is in 1882.
As you can see the page on the right has a little booklet with photos of Beatrix and her family.
I can't show you all the pages, but these are some of my favorites. Actually bats really creep me out but I love how they added a little copy of a letter to Beatrix from her brother Bertram, who had gone back to boarding school and left her in the care of his precious bat.You can see a photo of Beatrix with short hair on this page. She was very ill and lost almost all of her hair so what was left was cut. She continued to be ill between the ages of 18 to 21, then went into the world of business, as she put it.
She had decided to put her art to use and created Christmas cards, seen below. There were 6 designs using Benjamin Bunny, look how sweet they are. The one on the right opens up.
I love this next page. Beatrix used to write stories to the children of her former governess, whenever she couldn't visit, and there is an envelope on the right page which opens and inside is
a copy of one of those letters. It is so sweet, 8 pages of her drawings with a little story. Love it!
1904 - 1905 , she now had 7 books in print and they were doing well. I just liked this page with her drawing of a doll house which she used in "The Tale of Two Mice", she was also it seemed starting to fall in love :)
July 1905 Norman Warne asked her to marry him, but her parents were against her marrying a man in "trade". They put off announcing their engagement for six months, then her parents took of for summer holidays.
Norman was ill for a while and sadly died of his illness before Beatrix got to see him again, she was heartbroken.
That's all I have for photos for now, but you get the idea of this beautiful book. In the back cover is a copy of the Tales of Peter Rabbit, which is a reproduction of her privately printed edition.
Wouldn't this make a special gift? It certainly was special to me :)
