Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or There Must Be More to Life. SENDAK, Maurice.

First UK edition, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "For Raymond Briggs, Maurice Sendak, Dec. '75", together with an ink drawing of the milkman with a speech bubble. Sendak's "modern fairy tale of multiple themes" was first published in the US in 1967. Briggs and Sendak were connected through their publishers, Judy Taylor and Julia Macrae. Both women were part of a group of female editors who "transformed the children's book world in the 1960s" and who each formed close relationships with their authors (The Guardian). Briggs (1934-2022) was an illustrator, graphic novelist, cartoonist, and author. His posthumous book label is opposite the half-title. The winner of numerous awards, including the Kate Greenaway Medal (twice), the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and the Kurt Maschler Award, Briggs noted that "the whole point of illustration is that it is literary. If it is not, it remains a drawing only. Something must be 'going on' in the illustration" (Horne, p. 124). He is chiefly remembered for Father Christmas (1973), Fungus the Bogeyman (1978), When the Wind Blows (1982), and the perennial classic The Snowman (1978). The Guardian, 25 March 2015; Alan Horne, Dictionary of 20th Century British Book Illustrators, 1994. Small quarto. Frontispiece and illustrations throughout by Sendak. Original brown boards, spine lettered in yellow, front cover with illustration in colour, brown endpapers. With dust jacket. Lower corners worn; extremities of unclipped jacket worn, some foxing and surface abrasions: a very good copy in like jacket.