The Peter Pan Picture Book

This is an illustrated story book which includes 28 colour prints, complete with protective titled sheets.  Some pages have musical score and song notation.  This is the second impression published in the month following the first edition.   Sir J M Barrie wrote "Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up", as a stage play, full of theatrical spectacle and intended for an audience of children.  On 27 December 1904, the first production of Peter Pan was staged in London.  The demand for a children's story book based on the play led to Barrie giving his blessing to "The Peter Pan Picture Book", which was published with 28 inspired illustrations by Alice B Woodward, and a text adapted from the play by Daniel O'Connor.   The themes of Peter Pan developed gradually in Barrie's writing; privately in his notebooks, as a way of understanding himself, then in "The Boy Castaways", which was written and printed specially for the boys of the Llewelyn Davies family in 1901.   In "The Little White Bird", a novel for adult readers published in 1902, Peter Pan arrives in a publically available work for the first time.  This novel tells of how Captain W -, a confirmed bachelor, befriends a small boy in London's Kensington Gardens and describes the imaginary world they construct together. Barrie's publisher extracted the Peter Pan chapters from this book and published them along with illustrations by the famed book illustrator, Arthur Rackham, as "Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens" in 1906. Barrie meanwhile, was writing the stage play that was to fuel demand for the children's story book.