ROBERTSON, W. Graham. ~ The Baby’s Day book from Ba to four years Old Binkie. [c. 1908].
Folio (290 × 240 mm) 16 unnumbered card leaves (plus numerous following blanks), onto which are pasted 13 typescript poems on verso plus 14 coloured ink and watercolour drawings pasted on facing recto leaves. Red half morocco, lettered ‘Graham Robertson’ in gilt on the spine. Some softening to the edges of some leaves (one with minor loss not affecting the pasted image, occasional light offsetting.
A unique album written and illustrated by the artist and illustrator W. Graham Robertson for Marion (‘Binkie’), daughter of artist Arthur Melville who had died in 1904. It is one of several (another is in the Ray collection in the Morgan Library, New York) devoted to the young girl who became Robertson’s muse in the years following Melville’s tragic death. It comprises ‘Six Songs of the Day’ and ‘Six Songs of the Dusk’, the typed poems accompanied by his illustrations, usually depicting himself ‘Ba’ and the infant Binkie, and bear titles such as ‘Glad Day’, ‘Sea Pinks’, ‘Sand Castles’, ‘The Nowhere Place’ and ‘The Lady Dream Come True’. The larger watercolours are on Robertson’s Rutland Gate stationery.