Only Obtainable Winnie-the-Pooh Book Manuscripts Come to The Winter Show

Peter Harrington is due to offer a group of original manuscripts and typescripts for Now We Are Six by A. A. Milne which it describes as "the only obtainable manuscript material for any of the Pooh books".

No other Pooh manuscripts for the four Pooh books remain in private hands since the manuscripts for Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner were bequeathed by Milne to Trinity College Cambridge, while the manuscript and preliminary drawings for When We Were Very Young were last sold at auction in 1986 and according to Peter Harrington are unlikely to be offered again.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first appearance in print of Winnie-the-Pooh.

The offering includes all that survives of Now We Are Six in the form of working papers, sent by Milne in stages to his publisher, material that has never been offered together as a group in this form as a single, unified collection.

It comprises the Introduction - composed from pasted slips of paper in Milne's own hand - dedication, two poems in manuscript (Wind on the Hill and A Thought), two short autograph notes from Milne to his publisher, instructions about the order of poems, and 10 poems in typescript (Knight-in-Armour, Solitude, Sneezles, Furry Bear, Buttercup Days, The Little Black Hen, Journey's End, The Good Little Girl, Twice Times, and Forgiven). It is being offered at US$100,000/£75,000.

Of additional interest are the author’s wishes about order which reveal his specific interest in two Pooh verses (“‘Us Two’ must come before ‘The Friend’ and with several poems in between”), and also refer to “the other ‘Christopher Robin’ verses [which] may come in any order”. The typescript includes a note for Solitude intended, presumably, for the illustrator E.H. Shepard (“the ‘house’ should be as little as possible. Just 3 sticks tied together at the top”), and also corrections in Milne’s hand to Sneezles. The poem Solitude is signed by the author.

“Two of the typescripts bear Milne’s address at 13 Mallord Street, Chelsea, on the letterhead," said Philip Errington, senior specialist at Peter Harrington, "a detail of striking resonance for us s the address lies just minutes from our London headquarters. We decided to offer the collection at The Winter Show taking place at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, given the city’s great affinity for Winnie the Pooh. After all, the original toys that inspired the Pooh stories are now housed at the New York Public Library, just a short walk from Peter Harrington’s new US rare book gallery.”

Peter Harrington will also bring to The Winter Show which runs January 23 through February 1:

• Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel illuminated by Alberto Sangorski (c. 1910–1929)
• an archive of P. G. Wodehouse's signed letters (1956–1974) to his longtime U.S. editor Peter Schwed touching on royalties, book titles, Jeeves adaptations, and Wodehouse’s own anxieties about age and productivity, and accompanied by a signed copy of Plum to Peter, the privately printed edition of their correspondence
• a complete set of first editions of all seven books in C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, each elaborately bound in custom morocco with original illustrations by Pauline Baynes and bindings by the Chelsea Bindery