Big Golden Book - Goldencraft Edition

Western Publishing (aka Golden Press, aka Simon and Schuster, aka Dell, etc etc) made a habit of offering their Disney books to schools and libraries with more durable bindings, that could handle more wear and tear than the books would typically encounter in a private home. These special editions were called Goldencraft Editions. Below is the Goldencraft Edition of the first printing of the Alice Big Golden Book.


It has all the first printing points of the standard edition except the gold highlights (not possible because of the special binding) including the floral borders and the A100100. The Goldencraft Editions seem to have been offered throughout the print run of the book, but only the first printings have this nice cover with a vignette of the standard edition cover.

The back cover has this cool logo for the Goldencraft Edition which shows children entering a what is presumably a school. These editions are difficult to come by as they would have only been distributed to schools or libraries, so only via some sort of library sale would these ever see the light of day ... or perhaps someone 'forgot' to return it ... it has been known to happen.

UPDATE: Steve Santi in his excellent reference book on Golden Books identifies this as a Series Three Goldencraft book, which would be the first Goldencraft version available for this title. Series Three bindings were produced from around 1950-1959.