The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

The first, the most desirable and the rarest of the seven volumes of the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis' masterpiece, born in part from a dream the author had: 'At first I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time...once he was there, he pulled the whole story together, and soon he pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him'. (On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature, 1980).

The Narnia books are 'intoxicating to all but the most relentlessly unimaginative of readers and must be judged the most sustained achievement in fantasy for children by a 20th-century author' (Carpenter & Pritchard, The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature 370).

'Lewis was perturbed by the simpering, wishy-washy way goodness was portrayed in most religious teaching, making children inevitably feel that it was much more glamorous to be bad. He agrees with the aesthetic tradition that art should teach by delighting, by making the reader enchanted with an ideal' (Harold Bloom).

First edition; 8vo (200 x 145 mm); illustrated colour frontispiece, further black & white illustrations within the text and full-page; extremely fine, modern, full navy blue morocco by the Chelsea Bindery, one-line gilt-panelled with a silver block illustration of Narnia to upper cover, elaborate gilt dentelles and all edges gilt; preserved in a leather-entry slip-case, a fine copy 173 pp.