Beatrix Potter’s Countryside Book

Beatrix Potter’s Countryside Book. Potter, Beatrix; additional illustrations and diagrams by Nicki Holt. London: Frederick Warne, 1989. First published 1989. Hardback, pictorial laminated boards. ISBN 0-7232-3484-1 / 9780723234845. 48 pages. Approximately 182 × 182 mm. Printed in Hong Kong. Typeset by William Clowes Limited, Beccles and London. Condition: as new. Square, clean copy. Boards bright, corners sharp, spine uncreased, binding tight. Pages unmarked: no names, inscriptions, stamps, foxing, or tears. Endpapers the plain red of the binding. A fine, apparently unread example. This is a square Warne activity book for children of about six and upwards, built around new reproductions of Beatrix Potter’s own drawings. It is not one of the little Peter Rabbit tales, and it is not the later 2020 Puffin picture book of the same sort of title by Linda Elovitz Marshall. The projects are grouped by season and tied to familiar Potter pictures: a nature notebook; reading weather (“Will it rain?”), with Jeremy Fisher and Potter’s pine-cone study; a miniature Jemima Puddle-duck pond; germinating pea seeds; an earthworm “nature’s mixers” jar; a small wild patch and pond; riverside watching; plaster casts of footprints; a summer bug hunt; leaf and bark prints; attracting butterflies and moths; soil, seaweed pictures, and spores; autumn birds; winter trees; tracks, feeding signs, and droppings; what the owl ate; and a seasonal nature-collection card. Equipment lists sit at the head of the practical chapters. Safety notes cover water, night walks, and tides. The Potter pictures are credited to the Armitt Trust, the Trustees of the Linder Collection (Book Trust), and the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, with Frederick Warne holding the remaining tale illustrations. Captions in this copy include the pet rabbit drawn in 1880 when Potter was fourteen, wild flowers of the same year, a magnified ant, freshwater creatures studied under a microscope, a siskin sketch noted as having died on 20 August 1879, and caterpillars drawn when she was nine. Tale pictures include Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, Jemima Puddle-Duck, Mr. Jeremy Fisher, Tom Kitten, Johnny Town-Mouse, the Flopsy Bunnies, Mrs. Tittlemouse, and Squirrel Nutkin, plus plates from Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes, Peter Rabbit’s Almanac for 1929, and The Fairy Caravan. Diagrams and the remaining line illustrations are by Nicki Holt. The cover background photograph is by Cressida Pemberton-Pigott. Helen Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) was an English author, illustrator, naturalist, and later Lake District farmer and conservationist. Brought up in London, she spent childhood holidays in Scotland and the Lakes, kept a private menagerie with her brother Bertram, and filled notebooks with fungi, fossils, insects, and animals drawn from life. The scientific habit is what this book is trying to hand on. The Tale of Peter Rabbit, privately printed in 1901 and issued by Warne in 1902, began the series of small illustrated books still published by Frederick Warne. She married the solicitor William Heelis in 1913, farmed at Hill Top and Castle Cottage, bred Herdwick sheep, and left most of her land to the National Trust. The drawings here are working studies as much as story pictures: the point of the book is that the same eye that made Peter Rabbit also knew a radicle, a pupa, a nuthatch’s anvil, and a squirrel’s table. Nicki Holt is the book’s second hand. The copyright page states that all illustrations and diagrams other than the Potter reproductions are hers: the jar experiments, pond section, plaster-cast sequence, cloud sketches, footprint chart, feeding signs, and the seasonal display card on the last opening. Her line work is instructional rather than narrative, and it is what turns the Potter plates into projects a child can actually do.…