For the 110th anniversary of the first publication of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter in 1902 her publisher, Warne, commissioned a very special edition.

One thousand copies were printed of this collectors set of the original Peter Rabbit, with some illustrations included for the first time as Beatrix Potter had actually done too many for the book that was first published and indeed almost all subsequent editions. Alongside this the actress and writer Emma Thompson created a new work illustrated by Eleanor Taylor to take the story further. Inside the outer card box you are presented with another box…

and within that the lined purple inner with the books inside presented in their separate sections.

This is certainly a luxurious edition of a classic children’s tale, and so it should be for the purchaser got two small hardbacks along with a facsimile letter to Peter from Emma Thompson for the, clearly opportunistic, price of £110.00.

Now don’t get me wrong the production level of this set is extremely high, the books are cloth bound with a specially designed print and just 1000 copies were made with a retail price of £110, but that is still a large sum for Warne as the margins on books for the retail booksellers are actually quite small and this sold out almost immediately so Warne very quickly made their profit. I paid considerably less than this when the set came out by buying from Amazon and there are currently a couple of sets available on Abebooks for around that price (including postage costs) but the set has largely vanished from the secondary market which may mean that I have made a good investment although that wasn’t the reason I bought it.

This is probably one of the finest editions of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter yet printed, and I do have the two 100th anniversary editions (cloth or cream leather bound) produced in even smaller amounts back in 2002, (500 cloth and 100 leather bound editions). But this is truly lovely with the purple page edging and the exceptionally fine printing of the remastered illustrations including various versions never before included in a single copy of Peter Rabbit. A prime example of which is shown below as this was in the 1902 first edition but dropped in 1903 for the reprint, not to appear again for 109 years. Other pictures never made early editions for reasons of space but are now included in this printing.

Emma Thompson actually made a very good job of capturing Beatrix Potters original style and whilst the illustrations by Eleanor Taylor lack the fine definition of Potter’s originals they do still capture the flavour of the much earlier books.

That they were successful can be seen by the later production of two more titles by Emma Thompson, The Christmas Tale of Peter Rabbit in 2013 and The Spectacular Tale of Peter Rabbit in 2014. The Further Tale is also available as a separate volume outside of this collectors set.

As can be seen above Peter has not learnt his lesson from 110 years ago and is still intent on exploring Mr McGregor’s garden and the wonderful selection of vegetables to be found there. This time he climbs into his picnic basket, rather than a damp watering can, and eats the sandwiches to be found there before, feeling full, he falls asleep in the basket. Waking in a rocking basket he finds that he is on the back of a cart heading off into the countryside an just manages to escape when he is found to be the picnic thief. Running away he encounters a giant Scottish rabbit

and ends up as an unwilling participant in the bunny equivalent of the The Highland Games. The gentle humour of the new book is a welcome counterpoint to Beatrix Potter’s quite often more near the knuckle story telling and I can see why Thompson was asked to write two more sequels.

Of the classic twenty three books usually collected in the box sets of Potter’s works all but two have now passed 100 years old, we just have Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes (1922) and The Tale of Little Pig Robinson (1930) to go. There are several others not normally counted such as The Fairy Caravan (first printed in the US 1929 and UK 1952) right up the The Tale of Kitty in Boots which didn’t get it’s own printing until 2016 when it was illustrated by Quentin Blake but this box set includes a fine edition of the first Potter book and also the first official book set in her stories not by Potter. It’s an interesting, if rather expensive, addition to the oeuvre and with the popularity of the tales only increasing with the release of new films it should be regarded as a landmark set for Beatrix Potter collectors.