Illustrations by Dorothy P. Lathrop for Walter de la Mare's Three Mulla-Mulgars (1919)

In 2008 I featured a handful of illustrations by Mildred Eldridge for a 1946 edition of Walter de la Mare's Three Royal Monkeys aka The Three Mulla-Mulgars. John at feuilleton alerted me to an earlier edition with wonderful illustrations by Dorothy Lathrop. He had posted a few and directed me to the full 1919 version on archive.org.

Lathrop soon became one of my favorite "Golden Age" illustrators and I've posted more of her work.

I recently found a 1925 Knopf printing of Mulla-Mulgars and made my own (imperfect) scans. Finding the right version is difficult because there are so many print-on-demand editions, but this looks like the one I have.

Robert Nedelkoff wrote about the book on the Neglected Books Page:

Walter de la Mare’s (1873–1956) saga of three motherless monkeys who search for their father through a series of nightmarish and wondrous landscapes and events was a fixture of English nurseries from its publication until de la Mare’s popularity faded some years after his death; writers from T. H. White to Mervyn Peake to Angela Carter felt its impact in their formative years. (In America it was mainly read in the 20s and 30s, and Robert Silverberg was sufficiently impressed by it to adapt its plot in a science-fiction novel.) Nowadays, it would hardly be an acceptable book for children - death and fear of death runs all through its pages, and the one human character, a sailor, refers to Africans as "blackamoors." But it is still one staggering read for adults—a work of fantasy with far more in common with the prose masters of the 17th Century than with Tolkien. Out of print in both England and America.