Description

RARE FIRST EDITION, PRESENTATION COPY, OF ROALD DAHL’S THE WITCHES, WARMLY INSCRIBED BY ROALD DAHL TO FAMILY FRIENDS AND WITH AN ADDITIONAL INSCRIPTION BY HIS SECOND WIFE, LICCY

DAHL, Roald. The Witches. London: Jonathan Cape, (1983). Octavo, original blue-green cloth, original dust jacket.

First edition, presentation copy, of Dahl’s Whitbread Award-winning children’s novel, with in-text illustrations by Quentin Blake, boldly inscribed to the Dahls’ friends Jan and Colin Ross-Munro: “To Jan & Colin, Love Roald,” and additionally inscribed by Dahl’s second wife on the dedication page: “Love from Liccy” with an enhancing alteration of the original dedication (crossing out the “For” to leave her printed name, “Liccy”).

“Roald Dahl knows every bit as well as Bruno Bettelheim that children love the macabre, the terrifying, the mythic. In his latest book, The Witches, a 7-year-old orphan boy, cared for by his Norwegian grandmother, discovers the true nature of witches and then has the misfortune to be transformed into a mouse by the Grand High Witch of All the World… It is a curious sort of tale but an honest one, which deals with matters of crucial importance to children: smallness, the existence of evil in the world, mourning, separation, death… The Witches is finally a love story – the story of a little boy who loves his grandmother so utterly (and she him) that they are looking forward to spending their last few years exterminating the witches of the world together” (Erica Jong, New York Times). “Dahl seems to have made an art form of the rediscovery that children tend to warm to the sorts of horror that make lesser mortals (adults) squirm with displeasure… He is undeniably special” (Connolly, 104). The recipients of this inscribed copy were Jan and Colin Ross-Munro. The Ross-Munros were friends of the Dahls, with Jan Ross-Munro being a particularly close friend of Dahl’s second wife, Liccy. Jan was a regular lecturer at the V&A in London, while Colin, born in Australia, was eventually appointed Queen’s Counsel in his adopted homeland of Great Britain.

A fine signed copy, most rare inscribed.