Text by Ian Jackson, Illustrations by Ann Arnold

"There was a mouse; she had a twin:
One mouse was Virtue, one was Sin"

So begins a tale of twin mice separated at birth in the long awaited second edition of The Chaste Mouse and The Wanton Mouse. A story chaste enough for delicate sensibilities, and just risqué enough for the more adventurous. The first edition was issued (with illustrations in black-and-white) as a libretto per nozze in 2002, and quickly went out of print. For this new edition, the artist has colored her original drawings, and the author has added a footnote. The book retains its charm as the erotic work that Beatrix Potter might never have got round to writing. It is the ideal fishnet stocking-stuffer.

Fifty-two pages with twenty illustrations; 4 3/16 inches by 5 1/2 inches. 
Printed on Mohawk Superfine at Puritan Capital in Hollis, New Hampshire.

Ann Arnold has illustrated five books for children:  Alice Waters’s Fanny at Chez Panisse (HarperCollins, 1992) and the recent sequel, Fanny in France (Viking, 2016), Sara  London’s Firehorse Max    (HarperCollins,   1997),   and two books of her own:   The Adventurous Chef:  Alexis Soyer (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2002) and Sea Cows, Shamans and Scurvy: Alaska’s First Naturalist: Georg Wilhelm Steller (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2008). Her illustrated edition of a little-known poem of thanks for hospitality by A.E. Housman, published under the title of the refrain, The Fowls are Fed is available here in the Shop.

Ian Jackson (1951 - 2018) was one of the very few erudite humorists and a celebrant of the Valentine, who brought to all of his works the expression of a brilliant intellect with delightful anecdote. He published a volume of Valentines with Footnotes, accounts of the distinctive language of the romance philologist Yakov Malkiel (Teach Yourself Malkielese, 2006) and the physicist John David Jackson (Mathein Pathein, 2016), and numerous obituaries and articles in Belfagor, Conférence, Taxon, Petits Propos Culinaires, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, and The Book Collector. His pioneering account of The Price-Codes of the Book-Trade (2010) was published in a revised and enlarged edition in 2017. He lived in Berkeley, California, in a home depicted in The House of 70,000 Books by Roderick Stinehour, also available from the Shop. Visit the author's website.

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