Hardcover. Red cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

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For conditions, please view our photographs. A nice clean very rare copy from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG. 

Christine Chaundler’s Arthur and His Knights – illustrated by Thomas Mackenzie – produced by Nisbet & Co. Ltd. (London) Presenting Chaundler’s version of the Arthurian legend, this tale opens with an introduction to Merlin and proceeds through a tale that would be familiar to many: Arthur is introduced to Excalibur and founds his Court around The Round Table; Merlin passes and Morgan le Fay begins her influence; Quests – including that for The Holy Grail – are described involving Lancelot, Sir Kay, Gareth, Sir Tristram and Sir Galahad; the exile of Queen Guinevere; and the passing of King Arthur.

Christine Chaundler (5 September 1887 – 15 December 1972) was a prolific English children’s author, who also wrote stories for boys as Peter Martin. Some of her hundreds of short stories were broadcast by the BBC. Born in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, the daughter of a solicitor, Henry Chaundler, and Constance Julia Chaundler (née Thompson), she was educated at Queen Anne’s School, Caversham, until the age of sixteen, and then at St Winifred’s School, Llanfairfechan. Apart from a brief period in the Land Army during the First World War, Chaundler worked in editorial jobs as she built her writing career. By 1920, her earnings had allowed her to build a house on the Sussex Downs, where she lived until her death in 1972. She never married. 1n 1910, Chaundler adapted Sleeping Beauty as a children’s play that was performed at the Biggleswade Town Hall. In 1912, she received 10s 6d, her first earnings, for a prize poem published in Girls’ Realm, Chaundler’s first earnings as a writer came in 1912, when she won 10s 6d in a Prize Poem competition run by Girls’ Realm. From then on she made a growing income from writing girls’ and boys’ stories and books. She was a sub-editor for Little Folks from 1914 to 1917, before serving briefly in the Land Army. After the war, she edited juvenile books for James Nisbet and Company until 1922. During the 1930s, she reviewed children’s books for The Quiver. She continued to write and became a prolific author of children’s novels, for boys under her pseudonym “Peter Martin” and for girls under her own name. A census of young girls conducted by the Western Mail in 1927 ranked Chaundler sixth among popular authors. Although she was bested by Dickens, Shakespeare, and Kipling, she was listed above Alcott and Stevenson. She wrote hundreds of short stories for magazines and children’s annuals, some of which were broadcast over the BBC’s Children’s Hour. However, the market for these types of children’s books had changed by the late 1940s and Chaundler turned to reviewing books, reading books for publishers, and marketing her short stories to the BBC.

Mackenzie (1887 – 1944) was born in Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, and became an artist producing illustrations for books, and watercolours. His earliest commissioned works were for Ali Baba and Aladdin and illustrations for James Stephens’s The Crock of Gold, Arthur Ransome’s Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp in Rhyme, Christine Chaundler’s Arthur and His Knights and James Elroy Flecker’s Hassan. He failed to make a career as a painter in France and died in 1944.