A Book of Marvels and Magic - Notes

Notes

• Many of her children's fairy-tale titles were illustrated, quite memorably, by Robin Jacques, who was quoted as saying "My preference is for children's books of the more imaginative and fanciful kind, since these leave greater scope for illustrative invention, where I feel most at home. Thus, my work with Ruth Manning-Sanders has proved most satisfying, and the twenty-five books we have done together contain much of the work that I feel personally happiest with."
• Others who illustrated her fairy-tale titles included Victor Ambrus, Scoular Anderson, Eileen Armitage, Raymond Briggs, Donald Chaffin, Brian Froud, Lynette Hemmant, C. Walter Hodges, J. Hodgson, Annette Macarthur-Onslow, Constance Marshall, Kilmeny Niland, William Papas, Trevor Ridley, Jacqueline Rizvi, Leon Shtainmets, William Stobbs, and Astrid Walford.
• For children's literature, Manning-Sanders' American and international publishers included E. P. Dutton, Heinemann, McBride, Laurie, Oxford University Press, Roy, Methuen & Co. Ltd., Hamish Hamilton, Watts and Co. (London), Thomas Nelson, Angus & Robertson and Lippincott.
• She worked for two years with Rosaire's Circus in England. Some of her fiction and non-fiction is inspired by her time with the circus. The novel The Golden Ball: A Novel of the Circus (1954) is said to have some parallels to the life of Leon LaRoche, a famed circus performer who was with Barnum & Bailey Circus from 1895 through 1902.
• She was a poet and novelist, most notably in the years prior to World War II. At least two of her early collections of poetry -- Karn and Martha Wish-You-Ill were published by Hogarth Press, the hand-printed publishing house run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
• Three of her poems are featured in the 1918 volume "Twelve Poets, a Miscellany of New Verse," which includes 10 poems by Edward Thomas.
• She won the Blindman International Poetry Prize in 1926 for The City.
• She was, for a time, a poetry protegee of the English author Walter de la Mare. De la Mare took at least one holiday to the Manning-Sanders' residence in Cornwall.
• When living in Sennen, Cornwall, Manning-Sanders was, for a time, a neighbor of British writer Mary Butts.
• Her short story, "John Pettigrew's Mirror," was published in "One and All - A Selection of Stories from Cornwall," a 1951 anthology (edited by Denys Val Baker). The story was republished at least once, in the 1988 anthology "Ghost Stories" (edited by Robert Westall).
• Her story, "The Goblins at the Bath House," from A Book of Ghosts and Goblins is read by Vincent Price on an LP titled "The Goblins at the Bath House & The Calamander Chest," which was published by Caedmon in 1978 (TC 1574).