Carl Pforzheimer, an extremely rich book collector, began as early as 1925 to build up the collection of manuscripts, typescripts and Shepard pencil sketches which would eventually, after his death, sell at Sotheby’s in London in 1986 for ￡120,000 ($180,000). Milne obviously thought at this stage that his success might not last and he should cash in on it while he had the chance. Later he regretted very much that he had let the material go; he would be more careful in future.
Milne had always prided himself on his financial astuteness, but he made another mistake in 1925. An American publisher, David McKay Co. of Philadelphia, wanted him to write some stories to go with some paintings by an artist called H. Willebeek Le Mair. On 29 March, Milne wrote to Curtis Brown, ‘At present am still wrestling with the McKay pictures. As soon as any sort of book begins to heave in sight, of course I will let you know.’ As he was merely adding some words to a set of existing pictures, he foolishly agreed to a lump payment with no royalty. The Bookman said, ‘If you like Mr Milne’s verses, you will like his stories . . . They all come from the same mint.’ But posterity (and Milne himself) distinguished the wheat from the chaff. A recent critic said A Gallery of Children ‘intrudes like a pale white slug between two butterflies’ – but it sold on the strength of Milne’s name. He wrote to a friend in November: ‘For God’s sake don’t buy it. I sold the thing outright to an American publisher – in a moment of madness – for ￡200. He has already sold 50,000 copies at 3? dollars. Take 10% on that and you perceive that I have thrown away thousands.’ He told Ken that ‘McKay had the nerve to write and say that he looked forward to doing another book with me – verses with Shepard illustrations he airily suggested – on which he would “be willing to pay a royalty”. I told him to go to San Francisco and chew gum.’
Milne was working on more verses. He wrote to Curtis Brown in April 1925: ‘Yes, I am prepared to do a dozen more verses of the When We Were Very Young kind for serial use in the next year if you can make a deal with the Hearst people.’ Harper’s offered ‘up to ￡100 for 12 verses’ but Milne argued for fifteen guineas each, and got that. He had actually had twenty guineas at Easter for a poem in the Star, ‘and America is supposed to pay so much better than England’. He wrote to Ken:
Cassells are paying 200 guineas for the English rights of the twelve, provided that they average 30 lines each.
‘The King asked –
The Queen and – ’
Now you see the point of putting it out like this.
He was encouraging Curtis Brown to insist on 25 per cent ‘all through’ when it came to his next children’s book. What this would be he was still not at all sure. Certainly, he wanted to work with Shepard again, and indeed he had written to him early in 1925 to ask him if he would be interested in illustrating a new edition of Once on a Time, which had made so little impact when it was first published during the war.
My dear Shepard,
Did you ever read a book of mine called ‘Once on a Time’? No. However, I forgive you, as nobody else has. It was published – Hodder & Stoughton – in 1917, and died at birth. But until W.W.W.V.Y. I always thought it my best book.
And now, spurred on by our joint success, H. & S. want to bring out a new edition, illustrated by you. It is a long fairy story, and cries aloud for my one and only collaborator. Will you do it? H. M. Brock did it last time – 4 full pages, bad; and 20 chapter headings, not bad. If you would do it, it really might have a very big sale next Christmas. Hodder & Stoughton are writing to you. Methuens were very keen to get it away from them and publish it (with your illustrations, of course), but H. & S. weren’t having any.
I should like you to do it in the verse manner – with decorations all over the place – but I don’t know what the publishers’ idea is. Anyhow, it is a book on which I have always been very keen, and which I have always felt has never had a chance, so you can understand how keen I am that you should do it. It is full of Kings & Princesses and dragons & other strange animals – and, in fact, shouts for you. So come.
But Shepard was presumably too busy. Everyone was wanting him to do things. Milne hoped he might illustrate a gift edition of his old children’s play Make-Believe for Chatto and Windus (cashing in on his new fame as a children’s writer), but Shepard did not do that either. In 1925 Hodder and Stoughton brought out another edition of Once on a Time with delightful illustrations by Charles Robinson, Heath Robinson’s elder brother, most famous for his illustrations of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. When he was very young, he had decorated the first edition of Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses and it seems quite natural that someone would think of him now in connection with Milne, but in fact the Robinson illustrations for Once on a Time had appeared in America three years earlier. In spite of Milne’s efforts, for he was immensely fond of it, no one ever took a great deal of notice of it.
For the next two years, for the first time for many years, there were no Milne plays on in London or New York. But the book which was to make far more impact than any play and even than the children’s poems, was – though it seemed impossible at the time – not far off. Christopher’s bedtime stories consisted largely of the stuff of fairy tales – dragons and knights, giants and princesses and so on. Milne knew, as most parents do, that it is no good making things too exciting at bedtime. In fact, the more boring the story is, the more quickly the child goes to sleep. Nameless knights and indistinguishable princesses did the usual sort of things – ‘a completely contemptible mix-up’ Milne called it. But occasionally there was one story that was a little different. It was a story about the child’s bear and a balloon and some bees. And the bear, as we have seen, had recently acquired his very unusual name – Winnie-the-Pooh, that good name for a bear who had to blow flies off the end of his nose because his arms were too stiff to be useful.