Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House was a gift to Queen Mary from the nation; a showcase for contemporary craft and design, it preserved for history the ideal home of the 1920s, at a scale of one foot to one inch. Princess Marie Louise, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, conceived the idea, and through her influence many famous artists, designers, authors and craftsmen contributed to the project.
The dolls’ house library contains, alongside standard works such as four tiny Bibles, miniature atlases and a complete works of Shakespeare, over 200 diminutive editions of contemporary British literature. Princess Marie Louise personally wrote to the most famous writers of the time to ask for either an original composition or a suitable passage from work already published, transcribed by hand or submitted for professional copying. Though most are manuscript, there are a few printed works. The bindings are mostly morocco leather or vellum, some with beautifully precise gold-tooled decoration. The majority of the volumes were bound by Sangorski & Sutcliffe, with the remaining bound by Birdsall & Son, Hatchards, A. Loosely, R. Riviere & Sons and Zaehnsdorf. Each book contains a tiny bookplate designed by E.H. Shepard, the illustrator of Winnie the Pooh.
This copy of Dolls' song for a doll's house is full leather bound in vellum with gold tooling.