About
About Dawnchild Books
Dawnchild Books brings back illustrated books for children and the home that have been out of print for too long, with their pictures where they belong.
The books we choose
We publish books from the great age of illustration, roughly the 1870s to the 1940s, made for children or for family life at home, that deserve to be used again and not only collected. We look for a story a child today will follow to the end, or a household book a family would still keep on the kitchen table, and pictures that were made for it. We set the text from an early printing, usually the first, and we keep every plate and drawing.
Our first four titles all carry Beryl Irving's hand. Three she wrote: The Dawnchild, her fairy adventure of 1926; Daffy Goes to Sea, her sailing story of 1932; and The Family Week-End Book, her household companion of 1941. The fourth, Good Food, is P. C. B. Newington's cookbook of 1947, written from memory in the Singapore camps, which she illustrated. Florence Harrison, Walter Crane and Mrs Molesworth are next.
We publish for children and for the home, and nothing else.
How a Dawnchild edition is made
- The text is set afresh in clean type, never photographed from an old copy.
- Every illustration from the printing we follow is included and placed where that printing has it. Colour plates are in colour in the paperback and ebook; where a format prints them in black and white, its price line says so.
- Cream paper and a generous page, so the books sit well together on a shelf.
- Each book’s page here has a short note on who wrote it, who drew it and why it disappeared.
- Printed to order in the United Kingdom; for now printed books post within the UK, and ebooks go anywhere.
Every Dawnchild edition is set, proofed and produced by Newington Press, our studio. It also makes books for families, societies and publishers; those appear under their own names or Newington’s, never as Dawnchild books, and nobody can pay to join this list.
The running girl
Our emblem is Beryl Irving's own drawing from the title page of The Dawnchild: a child on tiptoe, hair blown back, one hand reaching ahead. It will stand on the spine of every book we publish. On title pages it stands inside a leaf-scroll oval.
Who we are
Dawnchild Books is a small independent imprint, named after the first book it published. It is part of Focal Point International LLC. We print in small numbers, to order, and we answer our own email.
Booksellers and librarians will find what they need on the trade page. Everyone else can write to hello@dawnchild.com.
Where the look comes from: the emblem, the colours and the spines, shown. Questions answers what people ask before they buy, and Notes collects the history notes from the books.