I LOVE this! I can just picture young Gordon Harkrader becoming so deeply immersed in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow that he could not help but to make it his own, creating his own cloth binding, end papers, book plate and illustrations to frame and complement the text.
And quite a wonderful job he did, right down to the 100% perfect lettering in black ink on the front cover, plus fancy logo of sorts merging his initials. The illustration above it is his too, with a variation on the same used for his hand-drawn and pasted-in book plate just inside, set against these fantastic endpapers hand-colored with thousands of yellow squares. Among the pages of the story he's done four illustrations--the first two in watercolor, the second two in pencil--which I think do a pretty fantastic job bringing the story to life. First we see ultra-lanky, long-nosed, big footed Ichabod Crane striding along his path to school just as described, and then a view of Sleepy Hollow itself, nestled in its valley. Our young illustrator turned to pencil for the terror-ridden parts of the story, set at night, culminating with Ichabod on his horse, Gunpowder, fleeing from the headless horseman (complete with steam emanating from Gunpowder's nostrils)!
I haven't been able to determine the date of the book, and there is no copyright page to the text, but would guess 1920s-30s. The text itself is 34 pages. Each of the illustrations is done on a page that is blank on the back and just a bit shorter than the other pages; I believe they were inserted specifically for this purpose and the entire book was hand-stiched together by its creator, with the text pages extracted from a different book/binding. The unpasted (free) end papers at front and back (i.e. the second endpaper and front and first at back) are loose, and there is some staining to the last page of text. Otherwise it is in very good condition, with the illustrations in great shape, and really quite a special thing--certainly the perfect halloween gift for a reader young or old! 7 1/2" t x 5 1/8" w x 1/4" d.
Documentation follows order of book, highlighting hand-drawn pages.
