The Bean Home News. Vol. 1 – No. 1. Farm Edition.
[New York]: Alfred A. Knopf. Circa 1946. 4 pp., 11 x 8 ½.”. Very good. One horizontal fold line. Item #3751
This is a seldom-seen promotional piece for Walter Brooks’ Freddy the Pig series of juvenile books that appeared between 1927 and 1958. It’s in the form of a newspaper and plays off the story line from Brooks’ 1943 book, Freddy and the Bean Home News, in which the intrepid pig begins a newspaper for the Bean farm’s (talking) animals and residents of the Centerboro area.
The delightful newspaper features numerous articles about characters that had appeared in previous Freddy books, including Uncle Wesley (the duck), Mr. Boomschmidt (of Boomschmidt’s Stupendous & Unexcelled Circus), Mr. and Mrs. Bean (owners of the farm inhabited by the cast of talking animals), Mrs. Wiggins (Freddy’s bovine partner in the Frederick & Wiggins Detective Agency), J.J. Pomeroy (the bespectacled robin), among others. Also included is a florid – as one would expect – letter to the editor from Charles, the rooster.
Approximate date of publication was derived from an advertisement listing the Freddy titles published thus far by Knopf, the last of which is Freddy the Pied Piper (1946).
In addition to Freddy the Pig, Brooks created Mister Ed, the renowned talking horse of 60s television fame.
A very scarce bit of Freddy ephemera: no examples located online or in OCLC as of cataloguing in January, 2022.
[ICN 7711.].
Price: $225.00