Hardcover Very Good with distressed but fair box holding front coloured pastedown 23.4 x 17 cm Eight coloured plates with subtitles pasted onto olive-green interleaved paper with protective sheets. bound in wine red laminated cloth, with gilt title, in original box (ends bumped hanging lose missing box title part faded) with illustration same as plate 1 pasted on frontcover endpapers somewhat browned, pages with some slight foxings and traces of age, storing and use. Over all a rather good and well kept copy protected by box. J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1911 ~Masefield?s first work for children, A Book of Discoveries and Martin Hyde, appeared in 1910, the year his son, Lewis, was born, and when his daughter, Judith, was five years old. Jim Davis, which appeared the following year, in 1911, is much shorter, and also less ambitious and dark; perhaps this is why it remained in print. It is the story of a boy who falls in with smugglers on the coast of Devon in 1812. The book is full of incident: there are gypsies, mysterious night riders, a sea voyage, storms, caves, fights, pursuits, and of course a sunken treasure. The influence of R. L. Stevenson's Treasure Island is also apparent in the figure of the gypsy Marah In Jim Davis, Masefield not only tells an exciting story, he writes vividly and even poetically about physical activity and the natural world. Though it was now fifteen years since he had been to sea, his memory remained clear. Jim Davis like Martin Hyde, draws in many other ways on Masefield's own early experience. (As Alison Lurie's Boys And Girls Forever. Children's Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter. New York 2002, p. 72 ). Jim Davis, John Masefield's fourth book for boys, was published in October 1911, a little apart from the rest of the group. It was the last of his pre-war novels. Jim Davis was by far the most successful commercially of Masefield's early boys' books -which is perhaps understandable because it is also the most conventional. Jim Davis is really, in a sense, too exclusively a "boys book" to be of much interest in itself; and it may therefore be more profitable to consider it almost as an anthology of various of the themes isolated in our discussion of Masefield's novels until now. Jim Davis, in effect, reads almost like a tract against adventures. The most successful element in the book, to my mind, is the clear strain of autobiography.