More Fairy Tales

Well, I told you that I have a vast number of fairy tale collections, so here are some more.

First up The Classic Fairy Tales by Iona & Peter Opie who were folklorists, and according to the Wikipedia entry on them, had the richest collection of children's literature in the world.

The interesting thing about this book is the illustrations. They do not content themselves with just one, to illustrate the story, they have several interpretative pictures for each of the well known fairy stories in this collection.

Below are some of the illustrations from the book.

First is one of those weird reversible head pictures purporting to be Cinderella & the Fairy Godmother drawn by Rex Whistler. I present both sides so you don't have to turn your monitor upside down to see the effect.

Cinderella	The Fairy Godmother

The next picture is by John Austen and is an elegant 1922 illustration for Bluebeard.

This collection of Russian Fairy Tales I remember buying when I was working at a science fiction bookshop in the 1970s. One of the guys who worked there practically sent the place broke ordering in lavish art books and other rarities like this collection. He was of Russian descent and dressed in black - looked rather like a portly vampire in fact. One of the stories in this collection goes by the rather gross title of The Snotty Goat.

Another couple of oddities that fit within the fairy tale category are these two.

The George Macdonald book is one of two volumes and was published by WMB Eerdmans in 1973. It is a collection of George MacDonald's fairy tales. George MacDonald is well known as the author of Lilith and Phantastes which were both published in the fabulous Ballantine Fantasy Series, which I will get to later down the track. Yes, you guessed it, I have a very good collection of them as well.

Hobgoblin & Sweet Puck is described by the author as "another collection of useless information, but pleasantly beguiling, I hope" and is a sort of scholarly investigation into all things faerie in name and, obviously, nature.