This fine edition of Travels with a Donkey was published by the Bodley Head in the UK and by Dodd, Mead and Company in the USA in 1931, but it was printed and bound in England. The book contains eight full page illustrations, printed with plate marks on unnumbered pages with titled tissue guards bound into the book, plus a decorated title page, decorated end papers and 19 small line drawings. Several other titles were published in a similar format, with black covers with an impressed gilt design, and with new illustrations by a well-known artist. In the USA it was called The Ebony Library. The titles in the library are listed on the back of the slip case shown below.

I have listed the German edition published in 1986 and reprinted in 1995, because it uses all of Blampied's illustrations from the Bodley Head edition, with credit to Blampied, but not to the publisher.

It is not clear who owned the original drawings, but the frontispiece was given to, or bought by, a friend of Blampied named Dr Freddie Phillips. The other seven drawings were shown at an exhibition of etchings and drawings at the Schwartz Gallery in New York in April 1932 (see New York Times, April 24, 1932). They were bought in 1933 by an American banker named Albert H. Wiggin, according to a date written on one of the drawings in the collection of the Boston Public Library (7.15.33 = 15th July 1933). Just before the Wall Street Crash in 1929, Wiggin sold shares in his own bank while his bank was recommending people to buy them, something that is illegal now. He profited greatly from the Crash and was eventually forced to resign.

Bibliography code: BOD-31.1.i

Publisher: John Lane the Bodley Head

Series: none

Year: 9th October 1931 (according to advert in Sheffield Independent, 28th September 1931, page 3)

Format: 8vo

Pages: ix, pp 189

Binding: shiny black gloth embossed in gold with title, author and illustrated by Edmund Blampied on cover; title, author, illustrated by Edmund Blampied and publisher in gold on spine

Size: 244 x 166 mm

Dust jacket signed: no

Internal illustrations: endpapers, frontispiece, title page and seven illustrations with plate marks on unnumbered pages, bound in with titled tissue guards, all illustrations signed Blampied; plus 19 line drawings some initialled EB

Price: not stated

Printing history: none stated

Printed by: Text by R. Clay & Sons, Ltd., Bungay, Suffolk; Illustrations by A. Alexander & Sons, London, E.C.

Notes: The right edge of pages is uncut or deckle edged; the top edge of the text block is stained red; one side of the leaf on which the illustration is printed is cut close to the binding, leaving a stub between pages x and xi, 20 and 21, 50 and 51, 70 and 71, 118 and 119, 144 and 145, 146 and 147, 150 and 151. This is assumed to be the first impression as it is signed and dated by Blampied in the year of publication.