Beatrix Potter’s long-lost story about “a well-behaved prime black Kitty cat, who leads rather a double life” has shot to the top of Amazon’s book charts months ahead of publication.
Potter’s manuscript for The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots was found by publisher Jo Hanks two years ago in the V&A archive. Featuring some of the author’s most beloved characters, including Mr Tod, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, Tabitha Twitchit and what Hanks called an “older, slower and portlier” version of Peter Rabbit, it will be published in September by Frederick Warne & Co, just over a century after Potter wrote it.
The day after the first news of the book, set to be illustrated by Quentin Blake, The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots is already topping sales charts: on Wednesday morning, it was No 1 in Amazon’s “movers and shakers” category, for those titles that have seen the biggest gains in sales ranks over the past 24 hours. It was the second bestselling children’s book on Amazon, and the eighth bestselling book overall.
“It’s phenomenal,” said Hanks. “You never know how something is going to be received. I know there’s a lot of love out there for Beatrix Potter but the response has been overwhelming. Kitty is a really fun character – a bit of a lovable rogue.”
At Waterstones, children’s buyer Florentyna Martin predicted that publication of the book this September would be “a highlight of the autumn publishing calendar”.
“The rediscovery of a Beatrix Potter tale is an incredibly exciting moment for children’s literature,” she said. “The combination of Potter’s classic storytelling and Blake’s signature illustration style is sure to make The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots a book to treasure for generations to come.”
Hanks tracked down the manuscript for the story after finding a reference to it in a letter Potter had written to her publisher in 1914. As well as three manuscripts for the story, written in children’s school notebooks, she also discovered just rough colour sketch of Kitty-in-Boots, and a pencil rough of arch-villain Mr. Tod.
Blake, who was approached about illustrating the book in early 2015, said he “liked the story immediately – it’s full of incident and mischief and character –and I was fascinated to think that I was being asked to draw pictures for it”.
