An unprecedented collection of original drawings by the best-loved children’s author in the English language achieved £23,940 in our June 2025 auction of Books & Manuscripts.
Books & Manuscripts
Roald Dahl’s Sketches of Childhood
31 May 2025
Dominic Somerville-Brown
Comprising some 30 sketches produced by Roald Dahl for his memoir Boy: Tales of Childhood, published by Jonathan Cape in 1984, the collection forms part of an archive relating to the publication of the work retained by the late Ian Craig (1944-2023) who, as art director at Cape, oversaw the production of Boy and was responsible for its final appearance in book form. Craig used Dahl’s sketches as inspiration for his own drawings, which were those eventually used in the published work.
Craig’s accomplished designs are to be sold as part of the archive, together with material including the publisher’s original page-layouts, correspondence, and more, the collection providing an enchanting view onto the transformation of Dahl’s memories into the printed form in which they would be cherished by generations of readers.
Ian Craig was one of the leading lights in illustrated book publishing and was known for his fruitful and longstanding partnerships with some of the most popular authors of his day.
The Boy archive is accompanied in the sale by further lots from his estate, including a copy of the Ralph Steadman edition of Dahl’s Mildenhall Treasure (1999) containing an affectionate original caricature of Craig (sold for £530); a copy of Judith Kerr’s The Crocodile under the Bed (2014) specially annotated by Kerr, and Alasdair Gray’s original cover design for his 1989 novel Something Leather (sold for £2,772); as well as Craig’s complete paste-up for Dahl’s posthumous work The Minpins (1991) sold for £5,040; and an additional group of signed Dahl letters and related documents.
Never before offered for sale and coming to market direct from the family of Ian Craig, the appearance of the production archive for Boy: Tales of Childhood was an outstanding event in the year’s auction calendar, and represents a major expansion of the known corpus of original autograph material documenting the fabled career of one of the world’s favourite storytellers.
