Doodle Soup [Signed and Inscribed]

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. Very Good/Good. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. First Edition. Octavo (23pp); 57pp. Publisher’s illustrated dust jacket with $11.95 price intact; boards bound in purple cloth with silver stamping to front board and spine; cream-colored endsheets. Merle Nacht’s whimsical black-and-white illustrations throughout. Dust jacket bumped and toned with significant creasing and wrinkling at front panel; front flap torn along crease. Boards bumped and faded along bottom edge; spine slightly cocked but binding remains sound. Textblock, endsheets, and interior pages clean. A Very Good copy in a Good dust jacket of this collection of poetry for children scarcely found signed. Signed by the Ciardi on the first free endsheet with a surrounding inscription by Constance Caraway, the woman to whom the book is dedicated.

Doodle Soup is the fourth book by John Ciardi dedicated to Caraway, his “beloved Aunt Connie.” Laid-in at front is a handwritten note from Caraway to Jack Cooper, to whom she gifted (or re-gifted) this book in winter 1985.