Description
The Very Good+ dust jacket has some wear at head of spine, illustrated with a boy, a girl, and a man riding a horse in a town square, price clipped. The Very Good+ binding is light blue cloth with illustrations of a man riding a horse on a statue in black, black lettering on spine. Very slight rub wear to spine ends. A small stain at bottom edge on back panel. Black-and-white frontispiece and illustrations. The binding is tight and pages are clean. The book measures 8.6″ tall x 5.8″ wide.
Stated “Second Printing”
About the book (from the dust jacket)
Nip the goatherd found himself at the head of a strange army. His troops had four legs, they had six legs, they had wings. The question was, what could they do against wicked Baron Gnarl and his men, who had taken over the kingdom of Croon and locked up the king and Princess Cristella in a dungeon? Nip had his hands full trying to keep them from fighting with each other.
It turned out a war where anything could happen – sometimes desperate, sometimes hilarious. Could the goats deal with Gnarl’s dragon? Would Snuffer the watchdog be able to steal the keys to the tower? Why, at a tournament in honor of the usurper king, did the heavy war-horses suddenly become bucking broncos, spilling their ideas like so many sacks of tin cans and ruining the show? Why did the whole court spend sleepless nights, scratching? It got so you couldn’t even trust the pigeons. In the end, the king is back on his throne, the animals in their own place,
and Nip has won the princess. And yet you wonder: man and beast work can out a way of sharing other kingdoms as well a they did in this one?
Though it does have a king and a princess, this is not a fairy story. It belongs to a family that can point to such illustrious members as Reynard the Fox, the Monkey of Chinese lore, and so on
down through Uncle Remus, the Jungle Books and Pogo,. Stories of animals that go to and fro and tell what they think of each other and of man. But it isn’t quite like any of a story of what might happen if ever animals should decide to join forces and play a part in man’s business.
About the author (from the dust jacket)
Mary Shipman Mian was born at Andover, Massachusetts and raised at various points between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Walla Walla, Washington. Since 1932, when she married Aristide Mian, a French sculptor, the family has divided its time between France and the United States; since the war they have shuttled between Meudin, outside Paris, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. This has produced a rather strange mixture of interests, language, and costume. ..French silk scarves and cowboy boots.
A graduate of Whitman College and browser at Radcliffe, Mrs. Mian also did a stretch at the New York School of Social Work. She began writing when James Thurber urged her to set down for the New Yorker her stories about her husband’s family on a farm in the Creuse. These stories appeared in My Country In Law, in England as well as in America. Of this book the Saturday Review writes “It is charming from first to last, full of the sweetness, pathos, humor, faith, and endurance of the common people of the earth.”
Mrs. Mian also has a novel to her credit, Young Men See Visions, a fantasy, The Merry Miracle, for adults but well looked on by children, and a translation of A Treasury of French Tales by Henri Pourrat, set by Marianne Moore in a class with those of Andrew Lang and Padraic Colum.
Mrs. Mian found herself writing stories for children when she acquired a grandchild and discovered that her own children had grown up, taking her unawares.
