Quentin Blake to Illustrate a Newly Uncovered Beatrix Potter Story

By Maryann Yin 

Quentin Blake Art (GalleyCat)The U.S. and U.K. divisions of Penguin Random House will publish a newly uncovered Beatrix Potter book entitled The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots. Potter wrote this story more than a century ago.

Quentin Blake, a world renowned illustrator, has signed on to create the artwork for this project. The release date has been scheduled for Sept. 6.

Here’s more from the press release: “The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots, a manuscript by Beatrix Potter, was rediscovered two years ago when Jo Hanks, publisher at PRH Children’s in the U.K., stumbled across an out-of-print literary history about Beatrix Potter from the early 1970s. Hanks found in the book both a reference to a letter that Potter had sent her publisher in 1914, which referred to a story about ‘a well-behaved prime black Kitty cat, who leads rather a double life,’ and an unedited manuscript of the tale. A trip to the V&A archive, where many of Potter’s items are kept, revealed three manuscripts, handwritten in children’s school notebooks, one rough colour sketch of Kitty-in-Boots, a dummy book with some of the typeset manuscript laid out and a pencil rough of arch-villain Mr. Tod.”