[KIPLING, RUDYARD]. The Second Jungle Book. London: Macmillan & Co., 1895.
FIRST EDITION, FIRST IMPRESSION; cloth-bound, hardcover, octavo (19cm x 12.5cm x 2cm), pp. [6], 238, [2] advertisements. English text, with illustrated throughout by J. Lockwood Kipling. Bound in publisher's original gilt decorated cloth, all page edges gilt, coated endpapers, half-title. Condition: VERY GOOD. Binding tight and secure. Cover well-preserved with very slight bumping to spine ends. Contents largely very clean, else for one or two thumb marks. Previous owner details to front endpaper. Scarce thus.
Note: First edition in book form of the complementary volume to Kipling's best-known work. An instant success on publication, The Jungle Book (1894) was followed by this title, which "completed the Mowgli saga with five stories that relate closely to those in the first book and that are essential to its emotional rounding-out" (Grolier). In 1907 the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Kipling "in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author". He was the first English-language writer, and the youngest ever, to receive the prize. Kipling's stories have had a long-standing hold on the public imagination and those included here were loosely adapted into the 1967 and 2016 Disney movies of the same name. Grolier Children's 100, 52.
