Just So Stories

Rudyard Kipling

Illustrated by the author

Originally told as bedtime stories for Kipling’s daughter Josephine, Just So Stories remains a classic of children’s literature. Simply and beautifully written, with an entirely believable, far from cosy vision of the jo

How did the elephant get its trunk, and the camel his hump, and who gave the leopard its spots? In the Just So Stories, Kipling set out to satisfy the ‘satiable curtiosity’ of his young readers with humour and imagination. The Elephant’ Child wrestles with a crocodile on the banks of the ‘great grey-green, greasy Limpopo river’; Stickly-Prickly hedgehog and Slow-and-Solid tortoise turn themselves into an armadillo to foil the predatory ambitions of Painted Jaguar; and the Ethiopian helps a Leopard to become invisible in the speckly shadows of the forest.

‘For sheer intensity of imagination, vivid realisation, comic ingenuity, intuitive understanding and uncondescending delight in the child’s point of view, [the Just So Stories] have never been and never will be surpassed’

Daniel Karlin

PRODUCTION DETAILS

Bound in cloth blocked with a design based on the first edition

Set in Plantin

192 pages

Frontispiece and black & white illustrations throughout

Plain slipcase

9½˝ x 6¼˝ 

ABOUT RUDYARD KIPLING

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865. He began writing poems and stories as a teenager. In 1892 he married Carrie Balestier, and it was at her family home in Vermont that he began to write Captains Courageous and The Jungle Book. They moved to England in 1896. Eleven years later, Kipling became the youngest, and the first English, writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in 1936 and was buried in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.