Tuck Everlasting (Easton Press Signed Collector's Edition)

BABBITT, Natalie. Tuck Everlasting. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2016.

Octavo. Full green leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 139 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity and bookplate pasted to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.

Natalie Babbitt (1932–2016) began her career as an illustrator, producing artwork for books by her husband Samuel Babbitt before turning to writing and illustration herself. She is the author and illustrator of more than a dozen books for children, but Tuck Everlasting — published in 1975, when she was forty-two — is the work that has defined her legacy. It has never been out of print. It is an ALA Notable Book and a touchstone of American children's literature, read in classrooms across the United States for fifty years. The New Yorker described it as "a fearsome and beautifully written book that can't be put down or forgotten." Babbitt died on 31 October 2016, the same year this Easton Press edition was produced — making this among the last books she signed.

The novel is short — 139 pages — and entirely without waste. Winnie Foster is ten years old, the sheltered only child of a respectable family in the village of Treegap, when she slips into the wood her family owns and encounters Jesse Tuck drinking from a spring. The Tucks, she discovers, drank from that spring eighty-seven years ago and have not aged since. They are immortal, entirely against their wishes, and they have spent the decades since in quiet movement across America, unable to stay anywhere long enough to attract notice. They take Winnie to their home and explain their situation to her, and the novel becomes, in the space of a few days, a sustained meditation on mortality, the nature of a life fully lived, and whether the gift of endless time would be a gift at all.

The question at the novel's centre — Winnie must decide whether to drink from the spring herself — is one of the oldest questions in literature, and Babbitt poses it with the simplicity and the seriousness it deserves, without sentiment and without condescension. The novel was adapted into films in 1981 and 2002, and into a Broadway musical that opened in the same year as this Easton Press edition.

Very good. Loss to cover gilt; very faint spotting to edge gilt. Contents otherwise fine.

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Catalogue Number: HH000606