The Hundred Dresses (Signed)

by Eleanor Estes

1947 signed and inscribed reprint, Harcourt, Brace and Company (New York), 6 3/4 x 8 5/8 inches tall orange cloth hardcover, no dust jacket, black lettering to front cover, [6], 81 pp. Slight to moderate soiling, rubbing and edgewear to covers, with cracking and chipping along the front hinge and spine caps, though the binding is quite solid. Bumping and wear to all four tips. Nicely inscribed ('With hundreds and hundreds of best wishes') and signed by American children's writer Eleanor Estes (1906-1988) on the half title page, which has a stray ink mark. Otherwise, apart from creasing to a couple of page tips, a very good copy - clean, bright and unmarked. 

The Hundred Dresses was a Newbery Honor Book in 1945. It spoke about the bullying of children based on their races and their nationalities. 

The book is about a young Polish girl named Wanda Petronski who is bullied by her classmates for her weird Polish name and the blue dress she wears every day. Wanda claims to have a hundred dresses at home and her classmates don’t believe her. After being pulled out of school by her father, Wanda wins a school art contest for her one hundred drawings of dresses. Her classmates felt regret about bullying her when they realized that it was their own faces drawn in the design of dresses by Wanda. Estes based the book on an incident from her own childhood, to atone for staying silent when a peer was bullied.