Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 156, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 July 1919 — The First Kipling Book. [ARTICLE]

The First Kipling Book.

Few who are reading Mr. Kipling's new volume of poems have seen a copy of that precious item of Kiplingiana, the first edition of “Departmental Ditties.” It was, as its author says, “only a sort of book”—a lean. oblong docket, wire stitched, bound in brown paper and secured with red tape, in imitation of an Indian government report. A hundred copies or- so were put together by the poet hmself and posted, in imitation official envelopes, “up and down the empire from Aden to Singapore, from Quetta to Colombo." The first issue contained only twenty-six poems, but others were added to the new edition rapidly called for, until presently the book changed its format, and grew into a conventional stiff-back, gilt-topped volume. “But," says. Mr. Kipling, “I loved it best when it was a little brown baby.”—Manchester Guardian.