Black Beauty (Great Illustrated Classics)

New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1944. Reissue. Hard Cover. Very Good/No Jacket. Beer, John. Minor wear to corners, ink gift note, two creases, and a couple small spots on front endpaper. Binding tight and square, text clean and unmarked. 1944 Hard Cover. 239 pp. Grey cloth, gilt titles, navy blue decorations and borders. Includes illustrations by John Beer, who was the first to illustrate this work. Brief biographical sketches of author and illustrator precede text. Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, the Autobiography of a Horse is an 1877 novel by English author Anna Sewell. It was composed in the last years of her life, during which she was bedridden and seriously ill. The novel became an immediate best-seller, with Sewell dying just five months after its publication, but having lived long enough to see her only novel become a success. With fifty million copies sold, Black Beauty is one of the best-selling books of all time. While forthrightly teaching animal welfare, it also teaches how to treat people with kindness, sympathy, and respect. In 2003, the novel was listed at number 58 on the BBC's survey The Big Read. It is seen as a forerunner of the pony book.