The Blue Book Of Fairy Tales

"Copyright 1959, renewed 1987 by Random House"--Copyright page.

The first installment of Andrew Lang’s popular fairy tale series. The Blue Fairy Book is a vibrant collection of children’s stories that have been published across the globe. Lang pulls from genre favorites such as “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella or the Little Glass Slipper” and “The Brave Little Tailor.”Originally published in 1889, The Blue Fairy Book, is the first in a series of popular collections by Andrew Lang that feature international fairy tales. It’s a compilation of more than 30 stories across different times and locations.The Blue Fairy Book consists of famous tales from authors such as Madame d'Aulnoy and the Brothers Grimm. Their works are retold in vivid detail in an easy-to-read format. Some of the most memorable stories include “Beauty and the Beast,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “The Story of Pretty Goldilocks” and “The History of Jack the Giant-killer.” The first edition ran less than 10,000 copies before becoming a major international success. Fans of classic fairy tales will adore Andrew Lang’s signature collection. The Blue Fairy Book marked the beginning of a new era in the author’s impressive career. It’s the inaugural edition of a long-running series that spanned well over a decade. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Blue Fairy Book is both modern and readable.

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Three favorite fairy tales—Rapunzel, Beauty and the Beast, and Toads and Diamonds—are brought beautifully to life in this classic Little Golden Book from 1959, with breathtaking illustrations by the inimitable Gordon Laite.

"Copyright 1959, renewed 1987 by Random House"--Copyright page.

The Blue Fairy Book – Illustrated by H. J. Ford – Volume I contains such classic fairy tales as, ‘East of the Sun, West of the Moon’, ‘The Yellow Dwarf’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Rumpelstiltzkin’, ‘Why the Sea is Salt’, ‘The White Cat’ and many more. This ‘Blue Book’ forms part of Andrew Lang’s ‘Coloured’ Fairy Books series – a series of twelve collections of fairy tales, published between 1889 and 1910. Each volume is distinguished by its own colour, and all in all, 437 tales from a wide array of cultures and countries are presented. Andrew Lang (1844 – 1912) was a Scots poet, novelist and literary critic, with a passion for folkloric story telling. Most of his volumes (including this, ‘The Blue Fairy Book’) were beautifully illustrated by Henry J. Ford (1860 – 1941), an inordinately talented artist who came to public attention with his illustrations for Lang. The books captured the imagination of British children, and later became worldwide bestsellers in the 1880s and 1890s.

Andrew Lang's series of fairy-tale books are some of the fundamental children's reading of the twentieth and late nineteenth century. The stories are not "original": there's no such thing when they were almost without exception passed down orally; but they are in old, not very modernized tellings. Many readers who have only seen or read modern, Disney-fied versions of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty or Snow-White will not recognize some of the darker twists in these tales. For example, in Sleeping Beauty, when the Prince wakes the Princess and marries her, the story is by no means over. The Prince's mother is an Ogress, whom his father married for her wealth, and it's suspected that she likes to eat little children; that "whenever she saw little children passing by, she had all the difficulty in the world to avoid falling upon them". The happy couple have two children, named Day and Morning, and the Ogress decides to dine on them one day when the Prince is away. Yes, it still has a happy ending, but Disney it isn't. The only thing that might have to be explained to a child is the occasional use of vocabulary that is no longer current. Most often this is the use of "thee" and "thou"; but a few other words will crop up. However, they're usually inferable from context, and the stories are marvellous entertainment regardless.