Kipling book found in archive

A first edition of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book has been found, with a personal message by the author to his daughter.

The rare find was discovered during a three-year project to catalogue items into an online directory at the National Trust's Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire.

Kipling handwrote the inscription: 'This book belongs to Josephine Kipling for whom it was written by her father, May 1894.'

Josephine died five years later at the age of six.

Fiona Hall, curator at Wimpole Hall, said: 'This inscription is very touching, especially when you consider that Kipling lost not only Josephine, but also his youngest child, John, who died in the Great War.'

The National Trust is cataloguing books at 166 of its properties, including 7,000 books in the Wimpole library.

Mark Purcell, curator of the organisation's libraries commented: 'This has been a big project to catalogue [the books] properly, but as one of the nation's favourite children's books of all time, this first edition of the Jungle Book with its rare inscription is very special.'