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Aesop's Fables > Books of Fables > Individual Books > 1850 to 1879

• 1850 - 1855
• 1856 - 1860
• 1861 - 1865
• 1866 - 1870
• 1871 - 1875
• 1876 - 1879

1850 Fables de J. de la Fontaine: Edition Miniature. Jean de la Fontaine. Paperbound. Printed in Paris. Paris: Fonderie Typographique. $25 from Caliban Book Shop, Feb., '02.

This must be the smallest full edition of La Fontaine's fables that I have. It measures a little under 2" x 3". At that size, it takes 250 pages and a magnifying glass to cover the fables and a two-page T of C at the end.

1850 Fables of Aesop and Others. Translated into English with Instructive Applications and One Hundred and Ninety-Eight Illustrations by Samuel Croxall. Philadelphia: Thomas Cowperthwait & Co. $40 by mail from Spivey, Kansas City, Jan., '96.

Many of the text-plates and apparently all the engravings here are identical with those in my 1863 Burnham edition. See my comments there. The margins are cropped closer here. The title-page and perhaps a few other pages (certainly 25) have been reset. The book is rebound in library buckram. Some foxing and staining; there is a tear on 49. Since there is a frontispiece and apparently one illustration per fable, and since there are 196 fables, am I right in believing that one fable must have a second illustration? I have not found it yet. The spine of this book reads "FABLEL." After reviewing a number of Croxall editions in 2000, I find this a strong book. It follows the Croxall traditions: frontispiece of the poet writing with Aesop over his shoulder, the strong patriotic preface, the AI before the fables, and the "Index" of virtues and qualities after the fables. Like other American editions, it drops the dedication to Lord Halifax and changes "Britain" and "British youth" to "America" and "charming youth" in the preface. Though this edition seems to reproduce my "Derby & Jackson" edition of 1845, I find the illustrations much more distinct and original. This book makes me look on that book's illustrations as copies.

1850 One Hundred Fables, Original and Selected. James Northcote, R.A. Illustrated by James Northcote and William Harvey. Third Edition. Hardbound. London: J. & D.A. Darling. $50 from Serendipity Books, Berkeley, Dec., 2010.

Is this book a reprinting of the original 1828 version of a hundred fables (first series) with 280 illustrations, done now by a different publisher than the original Lawford? Or might it be a reprinting of Northcote's second series done in 1833 by Murray? The book seems to be one or the other of these described in #262 of Bodemann. In fact, I am surprised that this edition is not mentioned there. Strong renderings of the illustrations, which consist principally of 100 framed ovals, 100 initials, and numerous endpieces. There is an AI with engravers' names at the back of the book. I like particularly the strong oval engraving in an elaborate rectangular frame at the start of each fable. The book was previously in the library of Gordon Thaxter Banks. Might I have passed over this copy at Goodspeed's in Boston in 1989?

1850 Recueil de Fables et Contes Choisis, À l'Usage de la Jeunesse. Par J. Christison. Second Edition. Edimbourg: Myles MacPhail. $6.65 at McNaughtan's, Edinburgh, July, '92.

Of the thirty-one selections in this assortment, only two are Aesopic fables: "The Monkey and the Dolphin" (IV) and "The Acorn and the Pumpkin" (XIII). The other stories lean heavily toward historical anecdote. I enjoy the curiosity of finding a book published in French in Edinburgh. What better place to find it than at the source? T of C at the front. Over forty pages of vocabulary at the end.

1850 The Bath Fables on Manners, Morals, and Fate. By the Rev. Sheridan Wilson. Phonetic version. London: Fred Pitman. $55 from Charles Lloyd in Baltimore, Aug., '91.

One of the craziest books I have found. The whole small-format book (except for one introductory page) is done in the phonetic alphabet. Slow and difficult reading! Fifty fables, each with a stated target audience. The fables seem to be one step from Aesop; in the first, a dreaming maid crushes eggs instead of spilling milk. There is an alphabet at the front and advertisements at the back for other phonetic books.

1850 The Child's Picture and Verse Book; Commonly Called Otto Speckter's Fable Book. Translated from the Original German by Mary Howitt. Illustrated with one hundred engravings. NY: D. Appleton & Co./Philadelphia: George S. Appleton. $24 through Interloc from Knieser's Used & Rare Books, Olean, NY, Sept., '97.

This is my earliest English edition of Speckter's work. The engravings are substantially simpler than Speckter's originals; compare "Dear Goose" (192-3) with the engraving reproduced by Hobbs on 91. Hey, the original author, is not even mentioned here. For other English editions of Speckter in my collection, see 1858, 1879?, 1885? (twice), 1885?/1900?, and 1885?/1910? Hobbs seems to have missed this edition when she says that an English translation came out in 1858. This Howitt edition may be one of those imitations that made Speckter so angry that, when they were sent to him, he consigned them immediately to the stove!

1850 The Pictorial Spelling Book. By Rensselaer Bentley. Hardbound. NY: Pratt, Woodford & Co. $20.01 from Walt Mariani, Holyoke, MA, through Ebay, Oct., '00.

There is a section of eight fables on 115-121, six of them with good rectangular illustrations. There is a very good moral to the first, "The Wolf in Disguise": "There would be but little chance of detecting hypocrisy, were it not always addicted to overact its part." Others include FC, "The Monkey and the Cats," "The Farmer and the Snake," WC, "The Eagle and the Crow," "The Farmer and his three Enemies," and "The Wolf and the Shepherds." The second-to-last is about a wolf, a fox, and a rabbit who were caught foraging in different parts of a farmer's yard. The hare admits eating some turnips but asks him to spare her and promises never to do it again. The fox and wolf lie and defend their actions. He executes the latter two for their hypocrisy and impudence. Might the frontispiece picture Aesop with some children? The first end-paper is missing a piece at the top; the second is torn out. The spine is weak. The seller rightly praised the section on "Accidents and dangerous practices of children: illustrated by Pictures," which begins on 83. Among these, "Playing with Guns and Knives" and "Drinking from a Hot Tea-Pot" get my prizes for their illustrations!

1850/55 Phaedri Augusti liberti Fabulae Aesopiae quum veteres tum novae atque restitutae. Ad optimorum librorum fidem recognovit atque de poetae vita et fabulis praefatus est Christianus Timotheus Dressler. Bibliotheca scriptorum graecorum et romanorum Teubneriana. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner. $25 from Turtle Island, Oct., '94.

Let me quote Pack Carnes, from whose Phaedrus bibliography I learned that this 1855 edition was a reprint of the 1850 original: "A school edition outfitted with a six page introduction. No glossary, no notes. Prints the five books of fables, then the Perotti Appendix, then an 'appendix II', with 30 fables recovered from the Romulus tradition, and finally a third appendix with twelve medieval versions of what are considered to be probably Phaedrine fables in substance, if not exactly in form." The book originally belonged to SFTS. Four pages of advertisements at the end.

1850/1979 Drollige Thierbilder und Reime aus der Fabelwelt. Neudruck der 1850 erschienenen Ausgabe. Mit einem Nachwort von Heiner Vogel. No author or illustrator or original publisher acknowledged. Printed in the GDR. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag. DM 10 at Hassbecker's in Heidelberg, Aug., '88. Extra copy for €7 from an open market vendor in central Munich, August, '07.

Beautifully colored reprint with witty little rhymes including lots of fables I recognize (and some I may not yet). "The Blind and the Lame" features the snail and the mole (1). Other fables include "The Bear and the Fly" (2), "The Dog and the Basket, (3), "Two Goats" (3), FG (4), and "The Dog and the Sausage" (6).

1850? Choix de Fables de La Fontaine: Edition Taille-Douce.  Gouget.  Hardbound.  Tours: Imprimerie Berthiault.  $223.56 from la petite boutique de bea through ABE, May, ‘21.  

1850? Ek Ton Tou Aisopou Mythoi Eklektoi/Nouveau Choix des Fables d'Ésope. Par E. Lefranc. Nouvelle Édition. Hardbound. Paris: Librairie Classique d'Eugène Belin. €13 from Stavros Lenis, Epsilon, Paris, Jan., '05. 

Here is a schoolbook that has lasted for some years. The preface to the first edition is dated 1824, and this is listed as a "Nouvelle Édition." The first two pages of the text, including apparently four fables, are missing, as are the closing pages of the preface. Apparently, the first of the three books of fables here has only eight fables. The second book has twelve. The third book has twenty. The three books, with simple texts and clearly separated epimythia, are followed by a very long and extensive "dictionnaire raisonné," covering 27 to 165. The pages are very thin. The book once belonged to something like "Lycee Imperial Bourg." Spotted, stained, and drawn upon.

1850? Fables de Florian, Suivies de Tobie et de Ruth. Illustrées par J.-J. Grandville. Précédées d'une notice sur la vie et les ouvrages de Florian par P.-J. Stahl. Nouvelle Édition. Hardbound. Paris: Garnier Frères. €150 from Librairie La Poussière du Temps, Paris, July, '03. 

At last I have a worthy copy of this classic. The strange thing now is that I can find no reference to it in the literature. Hobbs, Bodemann, Schiller, and my favorite private collector seem to know nothing of this book. As far as I can gather, it is a reprint of Bodemann #301.1 and #301.2. This book has the same title, illustrator, and essayist, but it is published in 1842 and then again in 1843 by J.-J. Dubochet & Cie. Soon (1847) Florian will find a new illustrator in Delhomme, and then in 1870 there will be Freeman and Phillippoteaux. I do not find further illustrators before 1885. These illustrations are familiar to me not least from fable cards like Bon Marché's Florian series. This is a serious and hefty book. The illustration facing 21 has suffered pencil damage.

1850? Fables de J. de la Fontaine, Nouvelle Édition. 2 volumes in one. Illustrée par MM. Pauquet et Henry Emy. Hardbound. Paris: H. Delarue et Companie. $50 from David Hall, Spencer, NY, through eBay, Nov., '02.

I cannot find this work in either Bodemann or Bassy, though Pauquet is mentioned four times in the former and once in the latter for other editions. There is no mention of either Emy or Delarue. 143 and 212 pages for these 5" x 7¼" separate volumes bound together. The red cloth covers feature elaborate gilt and black designs. The pages are gilt all the way around. There seem to be about five or six partial-page illustrations per book. These seem routine and derived from Oudry. Perhaps the most successful are "The Bear and the Gardener" on 53 and "The Two Rats, the Fox, and the Egg" on 105, both in the second volume. There is a fine full-page insert of "The Donkey and the Lapdog" on 73. Other full-page illustrations occur as frontispiece to both volumes; there is also "The Old Man and the Three Youths" facing 148 of the second volume. Each of these four is signed by Emy. There is a T of C after each of the two volumes, with an additional AI of the whole book after the second T of C.

1850? Fables de La Fontaine: Imagerie d'Épinal.  .  Seven hand colored illustrations.  Paperbound.  6me Série: Pellerin & Companie.  £120 from Roe and Moore, London, June, '02.

1850? Fables de La Fontaine: Imagerie d'Épinal.  Seven hand colored illustrations.  Paperbound.  6me Série: Pellerin & Companie.  £9.99 from Devils in the Detail, Headington, UK, Feb., '20.

1850? Fables de M. de Florian. Illustrée par Pauquet et Henry Émy. Nouvelle Édition. Hardbound. Paris: Delarue, Libraire-Éditeur. $20 from Second Story Books, Rockville, MD, Jan., '06. 

As was true of the LaFontaine edition I have from the same publisher, I cannot find this work in Bodemann, though Pauquet is mentioned four times there for other editions. There is no mention in Bodemann of either Emy or Delarue. The book is inscribed in Geneva in 1870. It was a surprise find at the end of a visit to the Second Story warehouse; it was among the rare books near the check-out desk. The end-papers are marbled. There is an AI at the back after 165 pages of fables. I am surprised that the avant-propos finishes on Roman "xx," and the first fable begins on the next page, labelled Arabic "9." There are the usual five books of Florian's fables, each with twenty-two fables, with seven partial-page black-and-white designs for every book. The engravings are often signed "Coste" or "Jardin." The book measures about 4½" x 7". Among the liveliest of the illustrations is the frontispiece depicting "Le Charlatan." At the end are the usual copies of "Ruth" and "Tobias."

1850? Fables de M. de Florian.  Illustrée par Pauquet et Henry Émy.  Nouvelle Édition.  Hardbound.  Paris: Delarue, Libraire-Éditeur.  €40 from Librairie de Sèvres, June, '19.

1850? Fables de La Fontaine. Avec des notes par Mme Amable Tastu. Illustrée de 20 grands dessins par Bouchot, gravés par Trichon. Hardbound. Sixième édition. Paris: Librairie de l'Enfance et de la Jeunesse: P.-C. Lehuby. 200 Francs from "L'Ire de l'Etre" at Marché Dauphine, Clignancourt, Paris, July, '98.

Front cover is separated. Covers and spine were once apparently impressive. Front cover has an embossed gold shrine to La Fontaine and back has embossed WL. Spine has medallions of La Fontaine above and Aesop below a panel resembling Grandville's FC. Tastu, Bouchot, and Trichon are not in Bassy or Bodemann. Nattily dressed animals in very expressive poses, as the slipsheeted frontispiece of DW immediately shows. WL (46) is discolored with both blue and foxing, but is strongly dramatic. It is the design used on the back cover. Others show less discoloration: FS (57); LM (78); UP (64); "The Wolf Become Shepherd" (100); FG (111); "The Ass and the Little Dog" (129); BF (a favorite of mine, 135); FWT (163); "The Stag and the Vine" (173); "The Stag Seeing Himself in the Water" (another favorite of mine, 191); "The Fowler, The Hawk, and the Lark" (197); MM (229); "The Cobbler and the Banker" (251); "The Bear and the Lover of Gardens" (with a great fly on the nose, 264); "The Monkey and the Cat" (327); "The Fish and the Flute-playing Shepherd" (355); "The Wolf and the Fox" (380); and "The Wolf, the Fox, and the Horse" (429). FG has a monkey lass standing in front of a ladder and holding a basket of grapes in one hand and a bunch in the other, while the fox shows a gesture of aversion. I have seen this illustration of "The Wolf and the Fox" (380) somewhere before; it has a very playful fox, who may even be thumbing his nose at the wolf down in the well! Several illustrations unfortunately have writing in red pen right on the picture. The images are very much in the tradition of Grandville. They are different from his illustrations in adding a tan background against which pure whites can stand out. The book ends with a table of authors from whom La Fontaine has drawn subjects and an AI. 456 pages.

1850? Fables de la Fontaine Illustrées par Bertall. Paperbound. Paris: Pantheon Populaire: Gustave Barba. 28 Euros from Antiquariat Althoheneck, Ludwigsburg, Germany, through ABE, June, '03.

Bodemann #316.1. This unusual publication is a large-formatted 72-page magazine combining all of La Fontaine's fables in two columns with Bertall's twenty-four illustrations. The 1850 date comes from her listing. Do I understand correctly from her listing that this work first appeared in four different installments and that it is the first part of a series that included other authors? Bertall is a nom de plume for Charles-Albert d'Arnoux. The illustrations are grouped together--usually in groups of three--on 1, 8-9, 16-17 ("L'Ane et le petit Chien" is one of the best), 24-25, 32-33 (DS and MM are both clever and well executed), 40-41, 48-49 ("Les Poissons et le Cormoran" is well done), 60-61. The striking illustration for "La Besace" appears on the title-page and on 1. There is a T of C at the rear. With its contemporary paper wraps, I am lucky to have found this work in such good condition over a hundred and fifty years later!

1850? Old Man and His Ass. Chapbook. Printed in England. Otley: Yorkshire J.S. Publishing & Stationery Co. Ltd. £ 26 from Nial Devitt Books, Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, GB, Feb., '02.

Here is an exquisite chapbook 4" x 6¾" with MSA in rhyme, specifically a sestet on every page. The treasure of this little book lies, I believe, in the four of its eight wood engravings that have the original hand coloring. At the end, the ass who fell into the river "never was seen any more." There are sixteen chapbooks in the series, listed on the back cover. This is #15. "Hare and many Friends" is the only other fable, and it is #3.

1850? Select Fables of Aesop and Other Fabulists. R. Dodsley. Lacks 65-68. London: Printed for William Osborne and J & H Mozley, Gainsborough. $10 from William Allen, Aug., '84.

This is a small book, falling apart. It is almost identical with other Dodsley editions, but a quick check of the frontispiece and title page shows clear differences, additions and subtractions. The book's condition is too poor to make learning from it easy.

1850? Select Fables of Esop and Other Fabulists. R. Dodsley. London: Printed for William Osborne and John Mozely (sic?), Gainsborough. $20 from William Allen, Jan., '85.

This is a small book, with separated covers. T of C on 229, with morals listed. The coarse woodcuts are intact. There is a compelling beginning picture of Aesop. Only the first book contains Aesop, in fact fifty-four fables, with a small illustration for each. Book II has fifty-three "modern fables," and Book III new inventions by Dodsley. This edition has at the bottom of each page the first word of the following page. The book is in good condition except for its covers.

1850? The Book of Fables. Paperbound. NY: Kriss Kringle's Library: Sheldon, Blakeman & Co. $11.50 from Stephen Jones Antiques, Washington, VT, through Ebay, Nov., '03.

This little (5½"x almost 4½") volume represents a curiosity, a conundrum, or perhaps just a simple mistake. It is clearly labeled on cover and title-page as The Book of Fables, but the contents (pages 5 through 64) seem to be entirely conundrums. Many of the pages are also headed "Conundrums." Did a printer make a mistake in matching signatures? One conundrum at least refers to a fable (about the mountain that gave birth to a mouse, 54). Several images may well be from plates for fable books: the injured lion (48), OF (50), the mountain and mouse (54), and the angler (with a small fish?, 55). The back cover with its list of publications in Kriss Kringle's library would be helpful if it had not lost most of its print! Do not miss the image of a very early train on 31.

1850? The Book of Fables. Paperbound. NY: Kriss Kringle's Library: Sheldon, Blakeman & Co. $24.99 from an anonymous seller through eBay, April, '03. 

This little (5½"x almost 4½") volume answers a question raised earlier by a volume with the same bibliographical information. That book consisted of conundrums, and I wondered if the printer made a mistake. This little book confirms that he did in fact make a mistake there in putting the fable cover on that book of conundrums. This little book is, by contrast, the real thing. It presents fables throughout its 64 pages. There is a good deal of coloring, probably, to judge by its consistency, done by the publisher. Notice how the images that include a lake or river get a careful portion of blue to cover the water. The texts are rhyming verse, sometimes padded for meter's sake. The Blackamoor here is a woman, overly washed by her young mistress (18). New to me is the story of an angler who has caught a fish. He pulls so hard to bring it in that he loses the fish, but his hard pulling means that his now free hook, pulled through the water, lodges in another fish passing by (32-33). BW contains a typo. The shepherd boy used "frequently" to divert himself by crying out "Wolf," and the husbandman [sic] left their work (50).

1850? The Fables of Aesop Adapted to the Hamiltonian System, By an Analytical and Interlineal Translation. By James Hamilton. Hardbound. London: W. Aylott and Co. $9 from DeWolfe and Wood, Alfred, ME, by mail, March, '08.

"For the Use of Schools and Private Learners." Here is yet another interlinear presentation of Aesop. A Google search revealed a Gospel of St. John published in the 1830's according to the Hamiltonian system along with other writings harder to date. This book is purposeful. After a title-page and a blank verso, there are 78 pages of one-hundred-and-forty-two fables. Each fable has a numbered Latin text and a Latin title, an "Affabulatio" (later identified as an "application), and a list of vocabulary roots as footnotes attached to specific words. Pagination starts over then, and each fable is presented again over the next 135 pages. This time lines of Latin and English alternate, the English done in italics. The word order of the Latin in this section is redone and follows English patterns, so that the English translation just below the Latin not only makes sense but flows well enough. Verbs, for example, come in second place in the Latin sentence rather than at the end. I could see this approach as especially helpful for those teaching themselves Latin. For a book this old, this copy is in surprisingly good condition. I would love to know where Hamilton got his Latin texts.

1850? The Ladder to Learning: Step the Second. By Mrs. Trimmer. Paperbound. Boston: Uncle John's Library, First Series, #II: William J. Reynolds. $19.99 from Eclectibles, Tolland, CT, through eBay, Feb., '06. 

This little paperbound booklet is 4½" x 5½" in size. It seems to be an American adaptation of the second section of the British work of slightly smaller dimensions. Though I am not able to compare the two now, I doubt that the plates are the same, even though the comments that I made on my 1835 British copy seem to fit the illustrations and texts here once one notes the different page numbers. Let me repeat some of those comments and then mention some of the curiosities of this volume: Mrs. Trimmer's work is mentioned by Hobbs (22), with a first edition in 1789. Mrs. Trimmer's booklet tookthe name of ladder because it offers three steps, divided according to the number of syllables it allows in the words. Step the Second features fables using two-syllable words. The cuts occur throughout two to a page, one over the other. Unsigned, they are always titled and include a page reference to the appropriate fable. They surprise me with their detail and quality. A special prize goes to the pair of illustrations facing 65, including a good reflection of the stag in the water and a great deal of surprise from the naked thief in the well as the clever boy steals his clothes! By contrast both illustrations facing 72 are ghastly. The boy from BW is about to be torn limb from limb by a dragon-like wolf, and the man in GGE looks as though he has either seen a ghost or become one! I like this little book very much, since it tells its tales pointedly and illustrates them well. It seems to me to avoid the preachiness of so many contemporary works. When it comes then to this American edition, there are a number of curiosities worth noting. First, the second title-page has ""Containing Fables Consisting of Words Not Exceeding Three Syllables," while the the first page of text, two pages later, has "Containing Fables Consisting of Words Not Exceeding Two Syllables." The latter page seems more correct. Secondly, the long sub-title has been dropped: "A Collection of Fables Arranged Progressively in Words of One, Two, and Three Syllables, with Original Morals." Thirdly, the British edition had said "Edited and Improved by Mrs. Trimmer," but this edition has simply "By Mrs. Trimmer." Fourthly, there is no reference in this edition to the illustrations; the British edition had said "With Seventy-Nine Engravings." Fifthly, the book has now joined a series, namely the First Series of Uncle John's Library. Of course the place and publisher have changed. There is a hand-colored first frontispiece of a girl feeding a lamb. The pagination of this book begins at 65 for the first page of fables and ends on 122. The pages of illustrations are now paginated with the other pages. There are in fact thirteen pages of illustrations relating to twenty-six of the thirty-two fables here. The illustrations retain at least some of the spirit and character that I noted in the 1835 English edition. The book is inscribed in 1854. The strings holding together its binding are either loose or gone.

1851 Fables from Aesop and Other Writers of Standard Celebrity Explained and Adapted to Popular Use. By Edward Baldwin, Esq. Presumed first edition. Hardbound. Philadelphia: Hogan & Thompson. $24.95 from Kenny and Rosario Parolini, Egg Harbor Township, NJ, through Ebay, Oct., '00.

This book is full of surprises. I thought it must be a variant form of Baldwin's "1840/1920?" Fables Ancient and Modern Adapted for the Use of Children. It shares the same preface verbatim. It has sixty-nine fables, whereas that edition had seventy-one. I was ready to declare them two different books when I noticed some overlap in the titles. Investigation showed that the order is different but that the texts are the same. The only discrepancy I can come up with is that DM here (33) adds one sentence at the beginning of its text. I cannot find "The Daw and Borrowed Feathers" in 1840, but I find it here. A fable-by-fable analysis would come up with the few fables that appear in one edition but not in the other. My comments on that book apply here, and so I will repeat them. The introduction gives some surprising tips, which the versions follow: (1) Do not shorten fables; make them visible; (2) do not let fables end unhappily; and (3) introduce nothing new without explanation. Endings are thus often softened, and we get some surprises. The country mouse lives at Horace's villa, the town mouse at Maecenas' palace. The dog in the manger gets both the meat and an admonition. The miller recovers the ass. The ant gives the grasshopper a little. The hermit dismisses the bear after his wound. Men save the tangled stag before the dogs kill him. All ends well in "The Travellers and a Money-Bag." Furthermore, I notice in this reading of Baldwin's fables that in "The Poor Farmer and the Justice" (77), things turn out doubly different from the usual. The justice admits the farmer's claim, and the farmer feels so bad about having set the justice up with a counter-example that he uses the compensation to buy bread for the poor in the workhouse! In CW (124), the particular cat that the young man dotes on is grass green! When she bolts out of bed because she hears a rustling behind the drapes, the bridesmaids burst into laughter. She and her husband agree to ask Venus to make her a cat again, and the man happily marries another. The cat "was convinced that it was best to be content as nature had made her" (127). Happy endings are everywhere! In "The Satyr and the Traveller" (141), Baldwin is clear: "The satyr was in the wrong. The same thing is often found to serve two purposes" (144). The china jar in 2P (149) is not broken, and the author expresses the hope that she will not be. New to me is "The Murderer and the Moon" (186); it is not a strong fable. The illustration format here differs from that in the "1840/1920?" edition. There the illustrations, eight to a page, served as an unusual T of C at the beginning of the book. Here there is an illustration, again by an unknown artist, at the start of each fable. There are also frequent end-pieces, often of a single animal. At least the illustration for "Industry and Sloth" (238) is after Bewick's in his Aesop (1818). My favorite private collection has a listing that seems to be identical with this book. Item F-0901 there calls for a book done by Collins in 1856 with the same number of pages (240) as this edition. It has the title The Book of Fables: Selections from Aesop and Other Authors. Curiously, the first illustration here features not only a grasshopper and ant but a large monument behind them with the words "Book of Fables."

1851 Literary Fables, from the Spanish of Yriarte. By Robert Rockliff. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman. £3 somewhere in the British Isles, Summer, '92.

This edition of sixty-three fables has occasioned my most serious reading yet of Iriarte. The moral is stated in Spanish before the fable. The translator, like the author, chooses any form of meter that occurs to him for this fable. Misprint on line 4 of 26: lke for like. My list of "best bets" from Iriarte has grown from seven to twelve!

1851 Uncle Frank's Select Fables for Good Boys and Girls I: The Undutiful Young Lion. Francis Channing Woodworth. Chapbook. Printed in NY: Wm. H. Murphy. $35 from an anonymous seller, Feb., '02.

The cover reads "Uncle Frank's Fables for Children: The Undutiful Young Lion." First of six volumes (listed on the back cover), with pages numbered here surprisingly from 172-204. Twenty-three fables. The organizing principle seems to be the illustration on every right hand page. Small fables are filled in to complete the left-hand pages before each right hand page starts anew. The illustrations, apparently after Bewick, are fine. The selection of fables here is strongly traditional. I find only two that are new to me: "The Doves and Their Young Ones" (175) and "The Hounds in Couples" (189). Good condition. I am surprised that I have now been able to put together good copies of four of the six volumes in this very fragile set.

1851 Uncle Frank's Select Fables for Good Boys and Girls II: The Thief and the Dog. (Cover: Uncle Frank's Fables for Children.) Francis Channing Woodworth. NY: Wm. H. Murphy. $25 from Harold Burstein, Oct., '92.

Second of six volumes, with pages numbered consecutively (here 35-68). Twenty-five fables. The organizing principle seems to be the illustration on every right hand page. Small fables are filled in to complete the left-hand pages before each right hand page starts anew. The illustrations, apparently after Bewick, are fine. The reflections, when brief, are excellent, e.g., "The wants and weaknesses of individuals form the connections of society" for "The Blind and the Lame" (44). Good condition.

1851 Uncle Frank's Select Fables for Good Boys and Girls III: The Fir and the Bramble. (Cover: Uncle Frank's Fables for Children.) Francis Channing Woodworth. NY: Wm. H. Murphy. $25 from Harold Burstein, Oct., '92.

Third of six volumes, with pages numbered consecutively (here 69-102). Twenty-five fables. Here we have "The Dove and the Bee" (99) instead of "The Ant and the Pigeon." The organizing principle seems to be the illustration on every right hand page. Small fables are filled in to complete the left-hand pages before each right hand page starts anew. The illustrations, apparently after Bewick, are fine. Long moralizing reflections. Good condition.

1851 Uncle Frank's Select Fables for Good Boys and Girls IV: The Ant and the Caterpillar. Francis Channing Woodworth. Chapbook. NY: Wm. H. Murphy. $35 from an anonymous seller, Feb., '02.

The cover reads "Uncle Frank's Fables for Children: The Ant and the Caterpillar." Fourth of six volumes (listed on the back cover), with pages numbered here surprisingly from 103-36. Twenty-one fables. The organizing principle seems to be the illustration on every right hand page. Small fables are filled in to complete the left-hand pages before each right hand page starts anew. The illustrations, apparently after Bewick, are fine. I find four fables that are new to me: "The Sun and the Vapour" (117), "The Discontented Bee" (125), "The Splenetic Traveller" (131), and "The Beggar and His Dog" (133). Good condition. I am surprised that I have now been able to put together good copies of four of the six volumes in this very fragile set.

1852 Aesop's Fables. A New Version, Chiefly from Original Sources. Thomas James. With more than one hundred Illustrations by John Tenniel. London: John Murray. See 1848/52.

1852 Aesop's Fables. A New Version, Chiefly from Original Sources. Rev. Thomas James. With more than one hundred Illustrations by John Tenniel. Murray's Reading for the Rail. London: John Murray. Paperbound. See 1848/52.

1852 Fables Choisies de la Fontaine. A l'usage de la jeunesse. Nouvelle édition, augmentée d'un choix de fables de Florian, de l'Abbé Reyre et de divers autres auteurs. Inscribed in 1860. Louvain: Vanlinthout et Cie. $3.70 at Gilmorehill Books, Glasgow, July, '92.

My first book published in Louvain. A cursory examination suggests that almost all of LaFontaine's fables are here. Additional selections include fourteen from Florian, eleven from Abbé Reyre, and nine from others. This book has travelled: from Louvain to a German bookstore and user, to Swansea, then Glasgow, and now Omaha.

1852 Fables de Florian. Églogues et Contes en Vers. Various artists. Hardbound. Paris: Librairie pittoresque de la jenunesse. $75 from HenryT through eBay, June, '11.

The title goes on: "Ruth, Tobie, Le Chien d'Espagne, Le Chien de Chasse." I am delighted to see Wolfgang Metzner agree with my impression that the fable illustrations here often imitate Grandville (Bodemann, #321,1). His comment: "Ganzseitige Illustrationen: Tier-Mensch-Karikaturen im Stil Grandvilles, Fabelmoral gelegentlich als 'Bild im Bild' auf Tafeln, Gemälden, Büchern. Überwiegend Illustrationen zu Tierfabeln. Tiere fast ausschliesslich in Kleidung des Rokoko." There are also vignettes in the text, apparently without particular relation to the fables. Some of these are apparently borrowings from other works printed by Degeorge in Arras. These stem, according to Metzner, particularly from the La Fontaine edition of 1851. One gets a sense of the illustrations by viewing the detailed presentation of "Le Singe qui montre la lanterne magique" facing 49 and the smaller illustration on 49 of a writer at work. There are the usual five books of twenty-two fables each. This book is in very good condition. As Metzner suggests, it presents a curious melange of images, especially for a book of apparent serious intent. T of C at the end.

1852 Fables de La Fontaine Illustrées. Precedées de la vie d'Ésope et accompagnées des notes de Coste. Nouvelle édition dans laquelle on aperçoit d'un coup d'oeil la moralité de la fable. No illustrator acknowledged. Tours: A. Mame et Companie. 30 Guilders at Straat, Amsterdam, Dec., '88.

A complete little edition, with lots of simple engravings. Juno on 82 is scratched out: was someone saving the purity of the Capuchins? The book was owned by two of their monasteries. Inscribed: 1852? T of C at the rear. Morals are italicized within the fable texts.

1852 Fables Designed for the Instruction and Entertainment of Youth. A new edition carefully corrrected. By R. Dodsley. Paperbound. Paris: Baudry's European Library. $22 from Chandler and Reed Rare Books, Northampton, MA, through Ebay, Dec., '99.

This is an unusual little (3½" x 5½") paperbound edition of Dodsley's fables. First, it is unillustrated. Further, Dodsley published his fables in three books with a total number of 109 stories. See my comments on the 1761 first edition and the 1798 Crukshank edition. This little edition selects 58 of those to present here; as far as I can tell, the selections all come from Dodsley's second and third books, including modern and original fables. None seem to come from the first book, "Ancient Fables." The book adheres to Dodsley's choice in presenting the morals for these fables only at the end in an "index" devoted to morals. As is typical of Dodsley editions, this index presents the only opportunity for an overview of the book's contents. The final curiosity I note in this book is that it is a book of English fables produced in France. A quick check of the last fable presented shows small but consistent editing: the characters have been transposed in the title, the moral announced in the index has lost its introductory word "That," and the last line of the narration has lost a dispensable "of." There are some uncut pages.

1852 Fables et Oeuvres Diverses de J. La Fontaine.  Avec des notes et une nouvelle notice sur sa vie par C.A. Walckenaer.  Hardbound.  Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot Frères.  $8.95 from Gary Hast, Reno, NV, through Ebay, Jan., '20.

1852 Nouveau Recueil de Fables et Historiettes Mis en Vers. Gt. St-Amand. Paperbound. Paris: Imprimerie Bénard et Compagnie. $9.99 from Deborah Shurberg, Morris, CT, through eBay, August, '08.

The title continues "Sujets puisés en partie dans des Livres arabes, persans, etc. a la Portée des Enfants." Opening the cover presents the first curiosity. The cover changes the title-page's date of publication from 1852 to 1853. Instead of mentioning Bénard as the publisher, the cover refers instead to the "Librairie Classique de A. Poilleux, Éditeur." The booklet is inscribed "Paris, June, 1862." This small booklet (4⅛" x 6") has 64 pages and fifty-four fables. The introduction seems to create the fiction that they were handed to the author by Florian. A strange point in the booklet is the variation of three different typefaces for titles of fables. Might there be any significance in the particular typeface for each fable? The fables are numbered. Are they all in rhyming couplets? I notice old friends like "Les Deux Coqs" (12) and "Le Lièvre et la Lionne" (27).

1852 Select Fables from Aesop and Others. Illustrated with One Hundred Engravings from Bewick. Bewick. Hardbound. NY: William H. Murphy. $6.49 from Roy Huff, Honolulu, Hawaii, through eBay, June, '07.

Here is a small book (4" x 6") in poor condition. Green cloth covers. The spine has a gold title, a tall figure of Aesop the teacher and a student (?), and "One Hundred Illustrations." The front cover has a floral cornucopia. Both covers have handwritten "1852-222-06." The spine is crumbling. The early "Contents" is really an AI. The engravings after Bewick are about 2½" x 1½" with the same wavy-line border around each. Each text is followed by a short "Reflection." A cursory check suggests that the texts are not from Croxall. Though this book is published only in NY, the fisherman on 7 is fishing "on the banks of the Thames." Page 11-12 is missing a portion. 35-36 are lacking. Whole groups of pages have become detached. I am happy to be involved in saving a tired old book like this one! Of course I have the sense that I have a very near parallel of this book but have searched thoroughly and come up with nothing close. Should not "Engravings from Bewick" read "Engravings after Bewick"?

1852 Select Fables from Aesop and Others.  Illustrated with One Hundred Engravings from Bewick.  Hardbound.  NY: William H. Murphy.  $25 from Charity4511, through eBay, April, '18.

1852? Funfzig Fabeln für Kinder, Nebst einem ernsthaften Anhange. Von W. Hey. Mit Holzschnitten nach neuen Zeichnungen. Neue Ausgabe. Hardbound. Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes. DM 40 from Lehmweg Flea Market, Hamburg, July, '98. 

This is apparently Bodemann 277.3. That the illustrations are "new" by contrast with the 1833 first edition is clear from the illustration for the first story, where the crow now faces left and the background now presents a strong picture of a housefront with porch. The illustrations seem to match the description Bodemann gives there. Then again, this book may be only a reproduction of the "1852?" edition; I cannot find the "HP" and date which Bodemann seems to mention. Up to the "Anhang," only the verso of every page is printed; that is, one sees print only on the right-hand page-front. The material of the Anhang is quite pious. Pagination here begins anew for this appendix. After this appendix comes a "Nachschrift an die Eltern." Fable #6, "Knabe und Eichhorn," is inserted between #2 and #3 rather than in its appropriate place.

1852? Reynard the Fox, A Poem in Twelve Cantos. Translated from the German by E.W. Holloway. With thirty-seven engravings on steel, after designs by H. Leutemann. Hardbound. Dresden and Leipzig/London: A.H. Payne and W. French. €105 from Antiquariat Schubert, Mannheim, July, '07.

I fell in love with this book as soon as I saw it. Part of the fascination was that this is a German/English book: Payne's offices were in Dresden and Leipzig, while French's were in London. The greater part of my fascination was the excellent engravings, many of which represent the fable heritage of "Reynard." I have compared Leutemann's engravings with those of Kaulbach. Leutemann was clearly borrowing from Kaulbach on those he takes over. To my surprise, he adds several. Thus, while he has taken over several fable themes from Kaulbach -- particularly "The Horse and the Wolf" (44), "The Donkey and the Dog" (52), and WS (56)-- there are other fable motifs that seem to be in Leutemann but not in Kaulbach, particularly FK (26do), "The Envious Horse" (48), "The Wolves Caught in the Ice" (62), and "The Fox and Wolf in the Well" (68). This book is a treasure! The text is a translation of the Low-German version, titled "Reineke Bos," written in the dialect of Lower-Saxony. The first edition was published at Lubeck in 1498.

1853 A Selection of One Hundred of Perrin's Fables Accompanied with a Key. A. Bolmar. Hardbound. Philadelphia: Blanchard and Lea. $15 from Second Story Books, Rockville, MD, Dec., '09.

I have copies of this book from 1832, 1840, and 1842. The latter two copies were published by "Lea and Blanchard." This 1853 copy is published by "Blanchard and Lea." I will bet there is a curious story behind that change of name! The last pages offer advertisements for works available from not Blanchard and Lea but Lea and Blanchard! As I wrote concerning earlier versions, the first part selects one hundred fables. The second part ("Key") offers an interlinear pronunciation above and a translation below this same text. No T of C.

1853 Ausgewählte Fabeln des Phädrus. Erklärt von F.E. Raschig. First edition. Paperbound. Sammlung Griechischer und Lateinischer Schriftsteller mit Deutschen Anmerkungen. Printed in Leipzig. Leipzig: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung. DEM 12 from Antiquariat Schmitt, Munich, August, '98.

This paperbound booklet of 88 pages selects sixty fables for consideration. Most of each page is given to notes. Carnes #590 makes this the first edition of this booklet.

1853 Book of Fables Illustrated by Facts from Real Life.  William Oland Bourne.  Hardbound.  London/Edinburgh: T. Nelson and Sons.  $28.70 from Jeff Bawden, Reading, UK, through eBay, May, '16.

1853 Fables de P. Lachambeaudie. Preceded by a letter of Beranger. Illustrated after the designs of various artists. Paris: J. Bry. $28, Oct., '91.

Fourteen books of fables, with perhaps twenty fables in each, followed by diverse poetry. After an attempt to appreciate this French poetry, I come away saying that this is not much more than an old book. Fourteen full-page plates and many smaller engravings; of these the best may be the (human) "Fleur et Nuage" (II 2) and "Professor Owl" (34). Pierre Lachambeaudie is not mentioned by Quinnam, Hobbs, or my favorite private collector, nor is he included in Cinquante Fables (1885). I can see why.

1853 Gems from Fable-Land: A Collection of Fables Illustrated by Facts. William Oland Bourne. Hardbound. NY: Charles Scribner. $46.50 from Nicholas Smith, Darnestown, MD, through eBay, Feb., '11.

The purpose of this singular book is "to present one or more anecdotes of a fitting character, as real-life witnesses to the truth of the moral contained in the text" (vi). To fulfill this purpose, seventy-five standard numbered Aesopic fables are gathered, and each is matched with several factual accounts. The fables are listed on ix-xii. Fables are taken from Gay, Krasicki, Gellert, Herder, Croxall, Dodsley, Cowper, Lessing, La Fontaine, and others. Headers at the top of the page over the factual accounts state the virtue or attitude being praised. The illustrations seem to be taken from standard mid-nineteenth-century sources. This endeavour seems to me so nineteenth-century! Those interested in nineteenth-century views of education and fable will find good material in the introductory pages. The binding is starting to split at 193.

1853 The Comedies of Terence, and the Fables of Phaedrus. Literally translated into English prose, with notes, by Henry Thomas Riley. To which is added a metrical translation of Phaedrus, by Christopher Smart. London: Henry G. Bohn. $15 at Laurie, St. Paul, July, '89.

There is a detailed T of C on iv-viii, listing page numbers for both prose and poetry. The prose adds new fables attributed to Phaedrus and Aesopian fables from unknown authors. A random check finds the verse translations good.

1853/1940? La Fontaine et ses Fables. H(ippolyte) Taine. Vingt-cinquième édition. Paperbound. Paris: Librairie Hachette. $1 somewhere in the British Isles, July, '93.

I include this book in the collection because I have heard or read more than once that it is a classic, one of the two or three books one must read on La Fontaine. I look forward to it....

1853/2010 Phaedrus, Select Fables: Translated Literally In the Latin Order, For the Use Of Charterhouse School. Paperbound. London/La Vergne, TN: M. Sewell/Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprints. $16.10 from Buy.com, through eBay, August, '10.

This is perhaps the thinnest of the "On Demand Reprints" that I have found. In its 33 pages one finds first some forty Latin fables of Phaedrus. Then there are simple verse translations of the same. That is all that this volume offers. It is another help for schoolboys learning their Latin. There is nothing else. There are not even titles for the poems in either language. This project is at least competently executed.

1853? Fables de La Fontaine. Precédées d'une notice par C.-A. Sainte-Beuve. Gravures par T. Johannot. Paris: Librairie Furne. $100 by mail from Turtle Island, March, '97.

Bassy 37^t. Three-quarter Morocco, with marbled boards. Formerly owned by St. Bernard's Seminary Library in Rochester, NY (the library's lending rules are still on the pocket inside the back cover). Bassy praises the editor's job in putting together the eight plates by Johannot with four by Moreau le Jeune (for I, 22; II, 9; VI, 13; and VII, 10). For me, the best of the illustrations are "Les Femmes et le Secret" (200), "Le Mari, la Femme et le Voleur" (253), and "Le Thésauriseur et le Singe" (314). Johannot sometimes may tend to be a little precious. There is also a frontispiece portrait of La Fontaine, the artist for which is not indicated.

1853? Fables de La Fontaine..  C.-A. Sainte-Beuve.  Illustrations by R. Johannot and Moreau le Jeune.  Introduction by C.-A. Sainte-Beuve.  Hardbound.  Paris: Librairie Furne.  $35 from Patrick Koltz, San Francisco, CA, through Ebay, Nov., '20.

1853? Fables de La Fontaine.  C.-A. Sainte-Beuve.  R. Johannot.  Hardbound.  Paris: Combet.  €15.33 from Antiquariat Breuer, Hamburg, through Ebay, Feb., '21. 

1853? Le Livre de la Jeunesse.  Jean de la Fontaine, Florian, et al.  Illustrations by Bertall, Foulquier, et Gustave Janet.  Hardbound.  Paris: Gustave Barba.  €40 from Librairie Fauguet, Marseille, July, '23.

1854 Aesop in Rhyme, or Old Friends in a New Dress. Marmaduke Park. Hardbound. Philadelphia: C.G. Henderson & Co./NY: D. Appleton & Co. $80 from William Hale, Georgetown, May, '97.

This little book rewards some study. The first fables, through 78, repeat verbatim the texts of Jefferys Taylor in his 1821 Aesop in Rhyme, with Some Originals. From what I can tell, later stories in this book that repeat subjects also found in Taylor's book, like FK (101), do not use Taylor's texts for those stories. I note some changes of punctuation (e.g., line 1 on 54), in texts taken from Taylor. There is also a title-change in DS (49) from "The Dog of Reflection" there to "The Dog and the Shadow" here. With 288 pages, this little book tells a great number of fables! After the fables there are fifteen pages of advertisements for Henderson's books. Before the fables there are two beautifully colored pre-title-pages, one showing FS in a central panel and the other showing a bald man, presumably Aesop. The back of the title-page shows the volume entered in an Eastern Pennsylvania Clerk's Office in 1852. That is the same year of an apparent first edition in Collection X (F-0634). It sounds identical to this volume with the possible exception that it may be slightly larger in page size. The illustrations are in various simple formats and are never larger than a half-page. They are not those used in my 1823 or 1828 editions of Taylor. Gilt page edges, gilt embossing of a scene of the lion surrounded by animals on the cover, with FS inside a floral border on the spine under "Aesop in Rhyme."

1854 Fables de La Fontaine Illustrées.  Hardbound.  NY: Roe, Lockwood & Son.  €3.  Paris, July, '22.

1854 Fables et Oeuvres Diverses de J. La Fontaine. Avec des notes et une nouvelle notice sur sa vie par C.A. Walckenaer. Hardbound. Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot Frères. $55 from Roger Wicker, Berkeley, June, '99.

Three quarter sheep with marbled boards, octavo, 555 pages with engraved portrait frontispiece after Hopwood, and an AI. I have a Walckenaer edition of 1839 and another published in 1910. The fables seem complete; they have footnotes. They are followed by a small selection of poems, "Fragments du Songe du Vaux," letters, sonnets, and translations. Here is a sturdy and even pretty book.

1854 Fables for the Young. Illustrated by Numerous Engravings. Hardbound. Dayton, OH: B.F. Ells. $25 from Cheshire Books, Yakima, WA, through Ebay, May, '99.

This is a curious little (4½" x 5½") volume. The first 54 fables on 118 pages are standard traditional Aesopic fables. Then, on 119-92, we have 38 fables that are taken from Peter Parley's Book of Fables Illustrated by Numerous Engravings of 1836. Note the verbal similarity in title to what we find here on the title-page concerning the illustrations. At the very beginning of those fables on 119 there is a title inserted between illustration and fable: "Fables for the Young." In the first group up to 118, there are some prose and some verse fables. Throughout the book, each fable gets an illustration surrounded by an elaborate border made up of a repeated motif including something like a spread fan or palm leaf. The book is inscribed in 1856. The illustrations for the Peter Parley fables seem to be solidly in the tradition of the Parley editions I have seen. Check my comments on them, including Moral Fables and Parables (1863) by Ingram Cobbin, which claims Parley as a source. Here the one-page preface begins with "Peter Parley says," but Parley is nowhere else acknowledged. It only confirms the eclectic and unacknowledged character of this book that the frontispiece of "The Lion in Love" comes from Tenniel six years earlier. Of course there is no acknowledgement. There is a T of C at the beginning.

1854 Fabulista da Mocidade ou Fabulas Selectas.  Tristao da Cunha Portugal.  Hardbound.  Paris: J.P. Aillaud, Monlon e Compagnie.  €150 from Livraria sa da Costa, Lisbon, July, '24.

1854 The Fables of James Northcote, R.A.  Re-edited by Miss Corner.  Alfred Crowquill and James Northcote.  Hardbound.  London: Dean and Son.  Gift of Michael LaCroix, August, '14.  

1854 The First Part of Jacobs Latin Reader: Adapted to Bullions' Latin Grammar. Rev. Peter Bullions, D.D. Thirty-seventh edition. NY: Pratt, Woodford, Farmer, and Brace. $27 at Poplar Street Books, Charlotte, June, '97.

Inscribed in 1857. Perhaps first published in 1846, the date included on the back of the title-page. Compare this book with my 1849/65 edition—and read my comments there. That book adds Döring as an author and is adapted to Andrews and Stoddard's Grammar rather than to Bullions'. It comes as no surprise then that it was written by Andrews while this is written by Bullions! These must have been competitors for years up to this point, if they are both in such late editions (that is listed as the sixty-fourth edition, this as the thirty-seventh). This book has a section of idioms before the introductory exercises and the fables. The first fifty-two fables seem verbatim identical; of course the numbers of the references below change, because they refer to two different books. This book does not have the fifty-third fable included there, "De Vitiis Hominum." This book includes four alternative translations of the first fable in #14-17 on 330. Who wrote these fables that are so easily assumed by competitors to each other?

1854 The Parables of Frederic Adolphus Krummacher. From the Seventh German Edition. With Twenty-six Illustrations. (The illustrations are marked as by Van Ingen.) Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston. $15 from Colebrook Book Barn, Colebrook, CT, at Rosslyn Book Fair, March, '92. Extra copy for $7 at Renaissance(?), Dec., '90.

Almost two-hundred prose selections with one piece of verse on subjects biblical, classical, natural. . They are short on narrative and long on reflection. Is this perhaps a source book for preachers? One story of incidents from Aesop's life on 58; notable otherwise is the absence of fable where one might expect it. The illustrations are simple. Krummacher notes that he has dropped a "Dissertation on the Nature of the Poetry of Parables" from earlier editions. There are publisher's advertisements at the back.

1854/57 Aisopeion Mython Synagoge: Fabulae Aesopicae Collectae. Ex recognitione Caroli Halmii (Carl Halm). Paperbound. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner. DEM 25 from somewhere in Germany, July, '01.

This edition seems, except for the type on the title-page, identical with the printing I already have from 1884. The back cover seems to indicate that this is an 1857 printing of a book first published in 1854. As I mention under the 1884 copy, the preface is dated 1852. Like the 1884 copy, this edition includes 426 fables, with an AI at the back. There are plenty of handwritten notes all along the way through this text. There is a name written on the title-page, but I cannot decipher it. The cover page shows considerable browning, and the spine has been reinforced with tape.

1854? Fables, Vol. I and II.  Alexis Rousset.  Various artists.  Hardbound.  Paris?: L. Maison?  $76.43 from ABEbooks, Oct., '23.

1854? Flower Fables. Louisa May Alcott. NY: The Mershon Company. $1 at the Lantern, DC, Spring, '92.

I include this book in the collection only because of the title. These are nine tales that the flowers told to the elves. In the first, Violet goes from the Queen of the Fairies, who are the protectors of flowers, to win over the Frost-King by the power of love. In the second Eva visits Fairyland to see a hospital for wounded insects, a fairy school, and flower heaven. Two stories was all that I could take.

1854? Willson's First Reader. Title page missing. School and Family Series. NY: Harper and Brothers. Gift of Linda Schlafer, Oct., '92.

One fable occurs in this well used little reader: Lesson XXXI on 67 is the fable of the frogs and the boys. The reader introduces the fable in this quaint fashion: "What is a fa-ble? A fa-ble is a sto-ry which is not true. Yet ma-ny fables teach truths." Page 83 allows for some wonderful sleuthing on the book's dates: one of its coins--among which are a mill and a half-dime--is dated 1854.

1855 Child's Book of Fables. Paperbound. NY: Leavitt & Allen. $10.51 from Sharon Jensen, Rockford, IL, through eBay, August, '04. 

I have another copy of this little eight-page pamphlet. I have listed it under "1860?"; its illustrations are colored, and it adds a green cover. Here the illustrations are not colored, and the cover paper has the same color and consistency as the internal pages; in fact it is numbered as a page. On the cover (but not repeated inside, as in the other copy), an older man holds a book and perhaps reads from it while two children stand and listen. The fables included are FS, WL, WC, and DW. There is an extra illustration of a dog on the bottom of the back page/cover. The book measures slightly more than 2" x 3". A young hand of someone named "Smith" has practiced the name repeatedly on 2. Like its partner, this book has done well to last this long! It is an exquisite little treasure.

1855 Christmas Sports and Other Stories. Hardbound. Boston: Young America Juvenile Library: Brown, Bazin, & Co. $16 from Renaissance, Milwaukee, July, '98.

I noticed this companion when I found Fables in Verse in the same set. My reason for enjoying this book is that it uses two fable illustrations--one already used in that volume--to illustrate items here that have nothing to do with fables. Thus "Bringing in the May Pole" (10) occasions a reference to oxen who draw the May pole; facing that reference is the illustration of OF used on 35 of the other volume. Similarly "The Dance of the Milk-Maids" (14) includes for some reason the illustration of MM (17), and of course there is no reason to have here an image of a distraught maid with her milk on the ground! Sleuths may want to pin down the writing on the sign behind the maid in this illustration. It was not easy to get the Renaissance owner to agree to my buying just two books from a larger set. Now a year later, I still see the remaining books remarked in price sitting on the shelf.

1855 Fables.  M. (Jean-Pons-Guillaume) Viennet.  Hardbound.  Paris: Hachette.  $15 from everythingforeveryone on Ebay, March, '20.

1855 Fables de La Fontaine. Précédées d'une notice par C.A. Sainte-Beuve. Gravures par T[ony] Johannot. Inscribed in 1882. Paris: Furne et Compagnie. $100 at Paul Rohe and Sons, Chicago, Dec., '92.

Lovely engravings, eight by Johannot and four by Moreau le Jeune, besides an unclaimed frontispiece portrait of LaFontaine. Since there is no list of illustrations, let me mention all twelve, with "+" for the best. Johannot did 2W (41+), "The Shepherd and the Sea" (93), TB (137+), "The Young Widow" (158+), "The Woman and the Secret" (200), "The Husband, the Wife, and the Thief" (253+), "The Flute Fisherman" (279), and "The Miser and the Monkey" (314+). Moreau did "The Oak and the Reed" (46+), "The Lion and the Mosquito" (55+), "The Country Man and the Serpent" (151+), and MM (176). Bassy mentions Johannot some eighteen times and offers extensive comments on his style. This edition seems to be a second printing (the first was in 1853) of item #37^t on 267 in Bassy's catalogue. AI at back. Nice binding, marbling, and gilt edges.

1855 Fables in Verse. Hardbound. Boston: Young America Juvenile Library: Brown, Bazin, & Co. $16 from Renaissance, Milwaukee, July, '98.

This book gives me the feeling that I have seen it before, probably under other names. Its squarish page-format and short verse fables mark it off from other books. Each of the thirty-two fables (128 pages) receives one or two illustrations; many tail-pieces seem only vaguely related to the fable. The tellings seem to me at first glance to place it squarely in the tradition of Phaedrus. In many ways it is a classic book, even in its choice of fables to present. They include: WL, FK, BF, DS, LS, WC, "The Ass & Lion," OF, FS, "The Fly & Horse," DW, CJ, "The Man & Serpent," 2P, "The Lark & Her Young," "The Crab & Her Daughter," "The Mountain in Labor," SW, "The Satyr & Traveller," "Hercules & the Carter," GA, "The Ape & Her Young," DLS, DM, "The Stag & Vine," "The Mischievous Dog," "The Boys & the Frogs," "The Farmer & His Sons," "The Old Woman & Her Maids," "The Eagle & Crow," and "The Ass & Master." The printer and editor made a mistake: Fables 15-17 come after Fable 19, though the pagination works correctly. It was not easy to get the Renaissance owner to agree to my buying just two books from a larger set. Now a year later, I still see the remaining books remarked in price sitting on the shelf. Inscribed in 1857.

1855 Fables in Verse.  Hardbound.  Boston: Young America Juvenile Library:  Brown, Bazin, & Co.  $21.50 from Resource Books, Oct., '15.

1855 Literary Fables of Yriarte. Translated from the Spanish by Geo. H. Devereux. Boston: Ticknor and Fields. $5 at Harvard Book Service, Cambridge, May, '89.

I am surprised to learn that (all of?) Yriarte's fables have to do with academics. The representation here is good and witty, though I find I cannot take more than a few at a reading. Best of the early fables are "The Bear, the Monkey, and the Hog" (#3), "The Ass and the Flute" (#8), and "The Wolf and the Shepherd" (#25). A nice book by a grad who remembers the "walls of old Harvard."

1855 The Little Esop. Hardbound. Philadelphia: H.C. Peck and Theo Bliss. $17.51 from Matt Gatewood, Lakeland, TN, through EBay, Oct., '03.

This is the fifth version of this little book that I have found. Compare it with the first three and you find that the publisher is Smith and Peck in 1844, Loomis and Peck in 1846 and 1848, whereas now a Theo Bliss has entered the partnership. Compare it with the later version of 1860 by G.W. Cottrell and you have a much closer match. Like it, this book has only 96 pages, not 191. The page size, 3½" x 4½", seems to be even larger than the 1860 version will be. Unlike it, this book does not have printer's frames around its illustrations. Each fable here gets two pages, with a small illustration just before its text or on the left of the text at its beginning. The red cloth cover has no title or picture, and the spine is deteriorating. The title-page has the same picture of Aesop with two children and again puts a period after the title. Otherwise fair to good condition.

1855? Cent et Une Fables.  J. Poisle Desgranges.  3rd edition.  Hardbound.  Paris: Lehuby.  €70 from Anne-Marie Kucharski, Librairie AMK, Saint-Ouen, July, '17.

1855? Fabeln aller Zeiten und aller Völker (Cover and Spine: Fabeln Aller Völker). Herausgegeben von J.G. Walter. Mit 12 colorirten Bildern von G. Bartsch. Hardbound. Berlin: August Riese. €95 from Dresdener Antiquariat, Dresden, August, '07.

Here is a little treasure. The title is a bit exaggerated. Let me list the sources for the twenty-one chapters that fill its 284 pages: Hitopadesa, Bidpai, Locmann, Saadi's Rosengarten, Aesop, Phädrus, Boner, Waldis, Sachs, Gellert, von Hagedorn, Lessing, Gleim, Willamow, Lichtwer, Zachariä, Pfeffel, Ramler, Langbein, la Fontaine, and Lachambeaudie. Between five ancients, and two French, there are fourteen German writers! "Aller Völker"? The twelve hand-colored illustrations on cardboard are excellent. This is a triumph for hand-coloring! Besides the illustration of a woman telling a story to children -- on both the front-cover and the title-page -- "The Monkey and the Cat" is the frontispiece. Others include: "The Man with the Snake" (16); WC (48); "The Shipwreck of Simonides" (64); "The Ass and the Three Brothers" (80); "The Lioness and Her Children" (96); "The Dog" (112); "The Woman and the Spirit" (130); "The Unusual Men" (176; a loose page); "Diogenes" (224); and "Das Grosse Loos" (240). There is a complete T of C at the end.

1855? Fables de la Fontaine Illustrées par Bertall. Hardbound. Paris: Pantheon Populaire: George Barba. $15 from GenetParis1, through eBay, April, '04. 

Here is an apparently later printing of a work that I have listed under "1850?" Here are the changes I have noticed. The price has gone up from 90 Centimes to 95 Centimes. The publisher has changed from Gustave Barba to Georges Barba, and the address has changed to 7, Rue Christine. This printing is also hardbound. The bottom of the last page of the Tof C now acknowledges a printer, and there is an added page of advertisements at the end. Let me include my comments on the apparently earlier printing here. Bodemann #316.1. This unusual publication is a large-formatted 72-page magazine combining all of La Fontaine's fables in two columns with Bertall's twenty-four illustrations. Bertall is a nom de plume for Charles-Albert d'Arnoux. The illustrations are grouped together--usually in groups of three--on 1, 8-9, 16-17 ("L'Ane et le petit Chien" is one of the best), 24-25, 32-33 (DS and MM are both clever and well executed), 40-41, 48-49 ("Les Poissons et le Cormoran" is well done), 60-61. The striking illustration for "La Besace" appears on the title-page and on 1.

1855? Familiar Fables in Easy Language, Suited to the Juvenile Mind. By Miss Corner. Illustrations by Alfred Crowquill and James Northcote. Inscribed 1856. London: Dean and Son. $10 at Brattle Book Shop, June, '91.

Inscribed again and (in the same family) in 1916. The preface claims to shorten and simplify its original's applications; the reference seems to be to Northcote's original series of fables. (See his emblem on 110.) The fifty fables follow the same two-page format: an engraving in one of five or six standard frames; an engraved initial letter; a fable; and usually two applications, one of which is a proverb. Are the engravings identical with Northcote's originals? The illustrations seem better than the fables. No T of C. Previously known to me: "The Mastiff and the Curs" (38, "If there were no curs, I should be no mastiff") and "The Red Lobster" (50). There are four glow-worm fables!

1855? Pictures and Fables for the Young. NY: Philip J. Cozans. $44.30 from Golden Opportunities, Milford, NH, through Ebay, May, '00.

Early string binding. 10" x 6¾". Fourteen pages. Eight nice hand-colored plates. A pair of printed pages with images is followed in each case by a pair of blank pages. The fables are in verse. "The Donkey and the Ape" has the latter trying to persuade the former to give up his work and live free as he does; in a second phase, the donkey finds him tied up on display in a zoo. "Every living thing is born/To make itself of use." "The Obstinate Frog" has a frog father telling his son not to leave their pond for the glittering deceitful sea. "The Parrot and the Sun-Dial" finds the idle parrot screaming "What's o'clock?" all day, while the dutiful dial does what it is supposed to do. "The Monkey of the World" finds out from a wise old monkey of the woods that the people who invite him to all of London's parties are not his real friends and that they are only using him. "The Pet Dog and the House Dog" has the former inviting the latter ("house dog" here seems to describe a watchdog) only to let the house dog envy him. After talking about himself endlessly, the pet dog gets a lesson in purposeful life. "The Ape and the Looking Glass" has the former deriding himself unknowingly in the latter. In "The Hog and the Lion" the hog goes sick to the lion as doctor; before he knows it, he is the doctor's meal! As so often, the lion's face in the last illustration is more human than leonine. There are plentiful advertisements for various series from Cozans on the back cover. I cannot find this booklet in any of them.

1855? Pictures & Fables For the Young. Hand-colored. Paperbound. NY: Philip J. Cozans. $29.99 from Robin Nash, North Tonawanda, NY, through eBay, April, '12.

I have realized after cataloguing this booklet that I had catalogued a copy earlier. For several reasons, I will stay with duplicate copies and duplicate records. Cozens was at the specific address given here, 107 Nassau Street, from 1855 to 1861. This eight-page booklet -- including the inner covers -- is 10" x 6¾". The outstanding feature of this booklet consists in the hand-colored illustrations, one to a page. There are rather grossly done, but they probably offer a good view of how such coloring was done. The lion's face in the last story is typically human; lions were the hardest for many artists to portray, perhaps because they had never seen a lion. The stories are in rhyming couplets. They are heavily admonitory. We should avoid idleness and make ourselves useful. Pets are sychophants. Do not wander too far from home. What you despise as you look into a mirror may be yourself. The obverse of each interior page is neither printed nor painted.

1855? Select Fables from Aesop and Others with Two Hundred Illustrations. Hardbound. Philadelphia: Leary & Getz. $20 from an unknown source, Oct., '99. Extra copy for $4.99 from Katherine Merithew, Colton, NY through Ebay, July, '99.

This little book's collection includes 153 fables from twenty-seven different sources besides a few marked either "Anonymous" or "Original": Arwaker, Cowper , Croxall, Denis, Dodsley, Dutch, Epictetus, Esop, Fables of Flowers, Floral Fables, Gay, Gellert, Herder, Krasicki, La Fontaine, Langhorne, Lessing, Lloyd, Merrick, Moore, Mozeen, Pignotti, Pope, Senegal, Sentimental Fables, Tapner, and Whitehead. Croxall and Gay seem to appear most frequently. While some authors like Gay and Dodsley seem to be reproduced verbatim, others like Croxall are edited. The printer is sometimes careless about listing the author between the title and text; one needs then to consult the beginning AI to learn who composed this text. The preface differentiates this edition from others immediately with a strong statement of incredulousness about the morally corrupt fables which have been given to young persons. The fables here will be carefully chosen and edited. There is also a fine critique of Croxall's lengthy applications. The frequent tailpieces show an application of the fable; thus at the end of GGE we see a child who has broken through his drum (258). Many fables also have rather standard quarter-page illustrations before the text. A good example is that for MSA on 75. One fable I have seen seldom before is "Jupiter and the Farmer" (26) from Denis: the man who plans the rain on his own farm does not do as well as his neighbors, who simply let it happen. I found this book twice within a short time, and have never been aware of it before or after. I will keep both copies in the collection. They differ in their covers. The good copy has "Leary & Getz" in the midst of a checker pattern. The spine-cover is lacking, as is the last page of the AI. It is inscribed in 1861. Its page 333 is torn. It has twenty-four pages of advertising, and the address given there (224 North Second Street) is different from that on the title-page (138 North Second Street)! The poorer copy has brown cloth over boards, with gold "Aesop" on the spine. It is missing 229-50. It has twelve pages of advertising, with the same address (224 North Second Street) on both title-page and advertisemen

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1856 Aunty Wonderful's Stories Translated from the German for All Good Children Who Have Learned to Think. Cousin Fannie. Hardbound. Printed in Boston. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company. $40 from Black Oak Books, Berkeley, Dec., '03.

I had ten minutes while a friend was doing business in the post office, so I stopped in. I was lucky enough to find this curious little treasure. Two children, Herman and Augusta, go off to visit Aunty Wonderful and to hear her stories. Most of the nineteen verse stories feature a lovely full-page black-and-white illustration. The stories themselves are typical of the time, reinforcing good behavior. Thus "The Cat and the Poodle" is about keeping ourselves and our clothes clean. The cat here only bites the tail and ear of the rabbit and the weasel who come by turns to complain to her. Many of the titles are familiar, but the stories tend to change. The illustrations are inserted on thinner paper than the text pages have; the illustrated pages have nothing on their verso. Some pages have come loose. These are the stories presented here: The Cat and the Poodle Dog* (illustrated), The Rabbit and the Weasel*, Caroline and Louisa, The Bee and the Sunflower, Laziness (The Monkey and the Asses)*, The Farmer and the Donkey*, The Old Goat*, The Mouse and the Oyster*, The Coachman and the Fly*, The Ant and the Grasshopper*, The Monkey and the Miser*, The Hound with His Master's Dinner*, The Goat and Her Daughter*, The Cat, the Rat, and the Mice*, The Forest Dance, The Wolf in Shepherd's Clothing*, The Fox and the Raven, The Fox and the Wolf*, and The Two Watchmen.

1856 Fables, Vol. III and IV.  Alexis Rousset.  Various illustrators. Hardbound.  Paris: L. Maison.  $76.43 from ABEbooks, Oct., '23.

1856 Fables of La Fontaine. Translated from the French by Elizur Wright, Jr. Two volumes in One. Engravings by A. Hartwell (NA) from designs of Grandville (NA). Fourth edition. Boston: Sanborn, Carter & Bazin. Broadway Books, Derry, NH, Jan., '98.

The plates here are those of my sixth edition Tappan and Dennet from 1843, with larger margins and a double line framing each page. See my comments there. I have no idea what "Fourth Edition" means on the title-page here, unless this publisher had already published three earlier editions; this book is distinctly different from Tappan and Dennet's fourth edition of 1843. This thick volume puts both of the sixth-edition Tappan volumes under one cover. In curious fashion, the pagination begins anew after 248, but it starts--appropriately for the second volume of a two volume work--not with 1 but with 3. These engravings are exactly the same as those but they are indistinct in the printing.

1856 The Book of Fables: Selections from Aesop, and other Authors Explained and Adapted to Popular Use. By Edward Baldwin, Esq. Hardbound. With One Hundred Characteristic Engravings. New York: Robert B. Collins. $75 from John Michael Lang Fine Books, Seattle, Jan., '02.

This book reproduces almost exactly Fables from Aesop and Other Writers of Standard Celebrity Explained and Adapted to Popular Use (1851) by Baldwin, published in Philadelphia by Hogan & Thompson. All that seems lacking is the pre-title-page portrait of Aesop. The title is also different. The plates seem identical throughout. I make a number of comments there comparing that 1851 edition with another of Baldwin's first published in 1840. See those comments there. Other comments are more pertinent to this edition. Let me repeat some of them here. The introduction gives some surprising tips, which the versions follow: (1) Do not shorten fables; make them visible; (2) do not let fables end unhappily; and (3) introduce nothing new without explanation. Endings are thus often softened, and we get some surprises. The country mouse lives at Horace's villa, the town mouse at Maecenas' palace. The dog in the manger gets both the meat and an admonition. The miller recovers the ass. The ant gives the grasshopper a little. The hermit dismisses the bear after his wound. Men save the tangled stag before the dogs kill him. All ends well in "The Travellers and a Money-Bag." Furthermore, I notice in this reading of Baldwin's fables that in "The Poor Farmer and the Justice" (77), things turn out doubly different from the usual. The justice admits the farmer's claim, and the farmer feels so bad about having set the justice up with a counter-example that he uses the compensation to buy bread for the poor in the workhouse! In CW (124), the particular cat that the young man dotes on is grass green! When she bolts out of bed because she hears a rustling behind the drapes, the bridesmaids burst into laughter. She and her husband agree to ask Venus to make her a cat again, and the man happily marries another. The cat "was convinced that it was best to be content as nature had made her" (127). Happy endings are everywhere! In "The Satyr and the Traveller" (141), Baldwin is clear: "The satyr was in the wrong. The same thing is often found to serve two purposes" (144). The china jar in 2P (149) is not broken, and the author expresses the hope that she will not be. New to me is "The Murderer and the Moon" (186); it is not a strong fable. There is an illustration by an unknown artist at the start of each fable. There are also frequent end-pieces, often of a single animal. At least the illustration for "Industry and Sloth" (238) is after Bewick's in his Aesop (1818). My favorite private collection has a listing for this book (F-0901). The first illustration features not only a grasshopper and ant but a large monument behind them with the words "Book of Fables." That fits well with this book but less well with the 1851 edition.

1857 A New Dress for an Old Friend, Intended for the Amusement of Children, Being a Fable of Aesop in Rhyme.  Mary D. I. Carmichael.  With illustrations by the Authoress.  Lithographed by Vincent Brooks.  Hardbound.  London: Henry Vernon.  €42 from Antiquariat Rudolf, Nov., '18.

1857 Aisopeion Mython Synagoge: Fabulae Aesopicae Collectae. Ex recognitione Caroli Halmii (Carl Halm). Paperbound. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner. See 1854/57.

1857 Erstes Lesebuch fuer Deutsche Elementar-Schulen. Bearbeitet von P. Engelmann & F. Regenfu8 . Second edition. Milwaukie: Verlag von H. Niedecken & Co. $3 from Schroeder’s, Milwaukee, August, ’96.

This simple first German reader contains eleven fables among its forty-three prose selections and two verse renditions as well. MSA has a new twist: the passerby says "You are three fools. Isn’t it enough if two of you walk? Should not one of you be carried?" The early prose fables are presented in unmarked syllables. That is a challenging way to read a language, I have found.

1857 Fables de la Fontaine.  K(arl) Girardet.  First edition.  Hardbound.  Tours: Alfred Mame et Fils.  €18 from Versandantiquariat Frank Mihm-Speiser, Sept., '21.

1857 Fables of Aesop and Others Translated into English with Instructive Applications and One Hundred and Ninety-Eight Illustrations.  By Samuel Croxall, D.D. Hardbound.  NY: Derby & Jackson.  $45 from Turtle Island Book Shop, Berkeley, June, '13.

1857 Fables of Aesop and Others Translated into English with Instructive Applications and One Hundred and Ninety-Eight Illustrations. By Samuel Croxall. Hardbound. NY: Clark, Austin & Smith. $67.50 from Haslam's, St. Petersburg, July, '03.

Except for its cover, this little (4¼" x 6¼") book is identical with the Cowperthwait edition of 1850. Even the last word of the index on 358 has a similarly fractured letter "h" so that it misses its upper portion. The cover and spine are of blue cloth, with a gold embossed picture of hare, tortoise, and bespectacled fox on the cover. The spine has images of FS and FG in embossed gold. Interiorly this is a cleaner copy than my copy of the 1850 Cowperthwait edition. See my comments there.

1857 Fables Original and Selected. James Northcote, R.A. (both writer and illustrator). Illustrated by 275 Engravings on Wood. London/NY: G. Routledge and Co. Gift of Dave Dreis, Dec. '87.

This lovely little book may not fit into a collection of Aesop. At first I was going to exclude it. But Aesop is on the cover and he is behind more than a few of the fables, notably "The Dog and the Stork," which turns out to have a second chapter including a merciful stork and repentant dog. The engravings are excellent. The applications are overlong and moralistic and include appeals to Christian virtue.

1857 Oeuvres Complètes de Jean de La Fontaine. Avec des notes et une nouvelle notice sur sa vie par C.A. Walckenaer. Hardbound. Paris: Chez Firmin Didot Frères, Fils et Cie, Libraires. $20 from Serendipity Books, Berkeley, Jan., '11.

Here is a heavy 684-page tome that seems to have all of La Fontaine's works, starting with the fables. It is larger than my 1854 Fables et Oeuvres Diverses de J. La Fontaine by the same editor and from the same publisher. Leather with marbled boards, with the same engraved portrait frontispiece after Hopwood, and an AI of the fables within an overall T of C. I also have Walckenaer editions of 1839 and 1910. The fables seem complete; they have footnotes. This book belonged to Howard Baker, as Peter Howard hastened to point out to me.

1857 Peter Parley's Thousand and One Stories. Of Fact and Fancy, Wit and Humor, Rhyme, Reason and Romance. Edited by S.G. Goodrich. Illustrated by One Hundred and Fifty Engravings. Inscribed in 1869. NY: James Miller. $22.50 at Walnut Antique Mall, Walnut, Iowa, April, '93.

Here is a curious book containing 1001 items, including, the introduction says (xvi), the fables of Florian and LaFontaine. The frontispiece shows an early train. There are nine fables here, each with a strong engraving. The story of the expanding frog (114) goes into detail in describing what is left after the explosion ("two flabby pieces of skin, a head, and a pair of legs")! FG (304) adds a housemaid who says she would not trust the fox with the grapes. The best of the illustrations may be "The Fox and the Cock" (183) and FWT (299).

1857 Reineke Fuchs. Wolfgang von Goethe. Zeichnungen von Wilhelm von Kaulbach. Auf Holz gezeichnet von Julius Schnorr, gestochen von Allgaier and Siegle. Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta'scher Verlag. See 1846/57.

1857 The Fables of Aesop and Others Translated into Human Nature (Hand-colored). Designed and drawn on the wood by Charles H. Bennett. Engraved by Swain. Hardbound. London: W. Kent & Co. £398 from Henry Sotheran Limited, London, Jan., '00. Extra copy with red binding inscribed in 1859 for £43.89 from Mrs. D.M. Guest, Birmingham, UK, through eBay, July, 2003.

I had given up on the existence of this colored version when I found a Bibliocity advertisement for it from Sotheran and followed up. Am I ever glad that I did! This book is beautiful! Sotheran rightly speaks of the "spirited handcoloured engraved plates." There are some minor tears, one repaired, none affecting images. The color here is beautiful, even more brilliant than that in a page (or print?) I recently found of DW, visible on my website under "Separated Book Pages".  Comparison of these two shows the individuality of each, especially if one looks closely at the dog's face. Both book-covers are colored here as well. The front reproduces the frontispiece: a man is being tried before a frightening lion judge. The back reproduces WL. The title-page illustration of the man seeing himself as a wolf in the mirror is one of my favorites here. Others include DS (11), "Catspaw" (14), DW (16), and WSC (21). Pagination is by the number of the individual fable among the 22. No page, whether of text or illustration, is imprinted on both sides. Notice the s that is shaped like an "f." See my comments on the non-colored version. This is one of the stars of the collection! The good copy has a green binding. Since this book is exceptionally rare and the two copies are slightly different, I will keep both copies in the collection.

1857 The Fables of Aesop and Others Translated into Human Nature. Designed and drawn on the wood by Charles H. Bennett. Engraved by Swain. Rebacked with new endpapers. London: W. Kent & Co. $180 from Helen Younger at Aleph-Bet Books, Valley Cottage, NY, Oct., ’96.

I am surprised and delighted to have this book. I may have seen it once, at Southern Mississippi’s library. One delightful wood engraved plate for each of the twenty-two fables here, plus two other engravings. One is the title-page’s vignette of the man seeing a wolf in a mirror, and the other is the frontispiece. The latter illustration of "Man tried at the Court of the lion for the ill-treatment of a Horse," (also on the front cover) is carefully explained on the first page after the title-page. The same explanation announces a second volume coming within the year. Apparently it never came. The cover announces a colored version. The Pierpont Morgan has a hand-colored version. Would all of the colored versions have been hand-colored? Bennett does an excellent integration of illustration and text for serious social criticism. The analogy between fable and society often involves some very imaginative leaps; in fact "leaping" is itself one of them, used to make the fox of FG into a woman who has leapt on the dance-floor of life but has not grasped the prize of marriage. So the cheese in FC is the dowry or estate involved when a woman says "Yes." Bennett shows a lively sympathy for the poor (DM) and the artist (GA). Hobbs says his book is aimed at older children. She notes that, as with Grandville, the animals have human bodies, behave like humans and are fully clothed. She is right: a certain sophistication and knowledge of British life are needed for understanding these presentations. She notes that his followers in the use of color—Caldecott, Crane, and Greenaway—"have none of his sinister undertones" (98).

1857 The Fables of Aesop and Others Translated into Human Nature.  Charles H. Bennett.  Hardbound.  London: W. Kent & Co.  £49.75 from Malcolm Jarvis, Lichfield, Staffordshire, GB, thorugh Ebay, May, '19.

1857 The Fables of John Gay Illustrated. With an original Memoir, Introduction, and Annotations by Octavius Freire Owen. With 126 Drawings by William Harvey, Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel. Hardbound. London/NY: George Routledge and Co. $20 from The Supple Spine, Norwich, VT, March, '09.

This book seems to be a direct descendant of Bodemann #328.1, a first edition in 1856 by Frederick Warne. I presume that the "first edition" refers to both the publisher and the illustrations by Harvey and Dalziel. This book is thus internally identical with two presumably later editions I have dated to 1866 (smaller in format) and "1866?" (larger format). Both of these were published by Frederick Warne. (There is thus a historical anomaly here. This "reprint" is or may be earlier than the editions I have by the original publisher.) As I mention in my comments on the Warne editions, among the most interesting parts of this volume are the notes and endpieces. The notes show decided wit (e.g., 185-6). By contrast with the larger illustrations, which perhaps resemble Tenniel most but are inferior in quality, the endpieces are engaging (though unfortunately small) presentations of Aesop's fables--perhaps borrowed from Harvey's own work illustrating Northcote? Some representative illustrations and fables include: "The Monkey Who'd Seen the World" (I 14, "The Old Woman and the Cats" (I 23), and "The Baboon and the Poultry" (II 3). The blue cover here features a golden monkey reading Gay's Fables, with the title underneath: "The Monkey Who'd Seen the World."

1857 Wahrheit in Bildern: Aesopische und andere belehrende Dichtungen.  Fr(anz Xaver) Schneider.  Zweite Auflage.  Hardbound.  Vienna: L.W. Seidel. €36.30 from Antiquariat Löcker, Vienna, May, '20.

1857/1931 The Fables of Aesop. Illustrated by Charles H. Bennett. Compiled and with an introduction by Willis L. Parker. NY: Illustrated Editions Co. Good copy with dust jacket for $20 from Attic Books, Laurel, MD, Feb., '92. Another good copy for $12, Aug., '87.

Bennett's original black-and-white drawings make for a nice contrast with their better known colored version, to be found in Viking's 1978 edition and Bracken's 1986. The morals here are much shorter and less socially dated than in Viking's 1978 redoing; I suspect that the latter better represents Bennett. Finding this edition for the first time was a lovely surprise on a Saturday afternoon!

1857/1931 The Fables of Aesop. Illustrated by Charles H. Bennett. Compiled and with an introduction by Willis L. Parker. Inscribed in '34. NY: Deluxe Editions: Illustrated Editions Co. Gift of Liz Willems, Fall, '86. Extra copy with a green cover, different cover edges, and plain endpapers for $9 from The Book Cellar, Bethesda, Jan., '96.

Identical with the "Illustrated Edition" volume of the same year except for a different cover and paper that makes the book about 1/4 as thick. Excellent runs on Bennett's black-and-white drawings. I will keep the extra copy in the collection.

1857/1931 The Fables of Aesop. Illustrated by Charles H. Bennett. Compiled and with an introduction by Willis L. Parker. "An Illustrated Edition." ©1931 Illustrated Editions Co. Cleveland: World Publishing Company. $2, Summer, '89.

The bonanza of Bennett editions continues! This one has the 1931 copyright; the revised 1933 (not the 1931) introduction--but it is not dated, as it is in other 1933 editions; it is from a different publisher (World--as opposed to Illustrated Editions, DeLuxe Press, and Three Sirens Press); it has the very small format of the 1933 editions from Three Sirens Press.

1857/1931 The Fables of Aesop. Illustrated by Charles H. Bennett. Compiled and with an introduction by Willis L. Parker. Dust jacket. NY: Illustrated Editions Company. $7.20 at Green Apple, Aug., '94.

I cannot believe that I have found yet another different format of a Bennett edition! This one is almost identical with the 1857/1931 edition by World Publishing in Cleveland. It thus has a small format and thin pages. The covers and endpapers are different. Dated by Paul H. Schmidt December 7, 1940.

1857/1931 The Fables of Aesop (small format). Illustrated by Charles H. Bennett. Compiled and with an introduction by Willis L. Parker. Hardbound. NY: Illustrated Editions Co. $9 from Clare Leeper, July, '96.

I wrote of a Parker-Bennett-Illustrated Editions book that I found in 1994 that I could not believe that I had found another variation on a very often-played theme. This present book stayed on the shelf of "not yet catalogued" books for a long time because I presumed it was simply another copy of that book. Now, fourteen years after writing about that book and twelve years after acquiring this book, I notice one small difference: it has a different printer. Absolutely everything else I can find is the same about these two volumes, but this book is printed not by J.J. Little and Ives Company of New York, but rather by American Book-Stratford Press, Inc. of New York. Ex libris Sylvia & Milton Kraus. This copy does not have a dust-jacket.

1857/1933 The Fables of Aesop. Illustrated by Charles H. Bennett. Compiled and with an introduction by Willis L. Parker. "Three Sirens Press" on spine. NY: De Luxe Editions: Illustrated Editions Co. $7 at Bluestem, Lincoln, NE, Dec., '92.

I cannot get over the plethora of 1931 and 1931/33 Bennett editions! This one is identical with my 1857/1931/33 editions except for two features: both cover materials are different, this one featuring green felt and woven grey; and its publisher is given on the title page as "De Luxe Editions" even though the spine still has "Three Sirens Press." Not identical either with my 1857/1931 "De Luxe Editions" volume, for that has a white-and-blue cover and "DeLuxe Editions" on the spine. And that 1931 edition does not have the new 1933 introduction. This slim volume has some uncut pages at the end.

1857/1933 The Fables of Aesop. Illustrated by Charles H. Bennett. Compiled and with an introduction by Willis L. Parker. NY: Three Sirens Press. $8.50.  Two copies. And an alternate version, smaller and boxed, Summer, '86.

Now this is interesting. Somewhere in the summer of 1986 I found this book. Its corpus is identical with those of other Bennett editions but this book is one-fifth of them in size. The black-and-white illustrations are better done. And while its copyright remains 1931, it has a revised (but not stated as so) introduction by Parker dated in 1933. A great chance for comparative work. The two presses involved are four numbers apart on Fifth Avenue. At least for the time being I will hang on to all the different formats.

1857/1933 The Fables of Aesop. Compiled and with an introduction by Willis L. Parker. Illustrated by Charles H. Bennett. Hardbound. Printed in USA. NY: Palace Edition: Three Sirens Press. $2.50 from Time Traveller, Feb., '87.

This book is identical in all but cover with the boxed edition I have also listed under 1857/1933 published by Three Sirens. This copy has a brown-to-maroon cover and lists "Palace Edition" on the spine--but nowhere else. Like the boxed white-covered edition, it is slightly smaller in page-format than the two copies also listed under the same years and publisher.

1857/1933 The Fables of Aesop. Compiled and with an introduction by Willis L. Parker. Illustrated by Charles H. Bennett. Hardbound. Printed in USA. NY: Three Sirens Press. Gift of Brian Hook, April, '99.

This book is very closely related to the boxed white-cover version by the same publisher in the same year, but it has a dark gray cover with a blue fox and blue grapes. It also has a blue background for the title on the spine, on which there is also a design of the fox and grapes. It contrasts with the "Palace Edition" of the same years by the same publisher in the cover and spine material and layout and also in the page of advertisements at the end of the book. A wonderful gift!

1857/1933 The Fables of Aesop. Illustrated by Charles H. Bennett. Compiled and with an introduction by Willis L. Parker. NY: Windsor Press. $3 at Joe's Books, Oak Park, Dec., '92.

The corpus of fables is identical with those in the many Parker/Bennett editions listed nearby but this edition is about a medium in thickness, where others are either fat or thin. The cheap paper deadens the black-and-white illustrations. And while its copyright remains 1931, it has a revised (but not stated as so) introduction by Parker dated in 1933. Windsor Press has exactly the same address as Three Sirens Press. My, how one set of plates was re-used!

1857/1977 Tales from Times Past. Edited by Bryan Holme. Many (original) illustrators. First edition. Dust jacket. A Studio Book. NY: The Viking Press. $7, Summer, '86.

A really beautiful book. Aesop in Bennett's 1857 black-and-white drawings and his original version gets eight or ten pages at the end. One could do a project on these prose versions sometime. The hand-colored 1857 facsimile from the Pierpont has longer morals. The other editions follow with some deletions, but not always the same deletions.

1857/1978 Bennett's Fables from Aesop and Others. Translated into Human Nature by Charles H. Bennett. Foreword by Gerald Gottlieb. Dust jacket. Printed in Japan. NY: A Studio Book: Viking Press. Reprint of 1857 edition published by W. Kent, London, under title: The fables of Aesop and others, translated into human nature. $7.50 from Horizon, Seattle, July, '93. Extra copies for $11.95 from Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Winter, '84 and from another museum of art.

Lively and delightful illustrations, here reproduced vividly. If there is a problem with Bennett's wonderful pictures, it is that the social commentary is so pointed that we lose or miss something as we view them in a different age. Bennett's witty pictures get strong reactions in slide lectures, perhaps partly for sheer visual delight. My three copies of this book are marked $8.95, $11.95, and $14.95. Will the book hit $20 soon?

1857/1978 Bennett's Fables from Aesop and Others. Charles H. Bennett. Foreword by Gerald Gottlieb. Dust-jacket. Hardbound. NY: A Studio Book: Viking Press. $5 from Elisabeth Butkovich, Kew Gardens, NY, through eBay, Oct., '10.

I already have several copies of this book, but this copy has a difference. The copy came in an eBay sale of several good recent illustrated fable books at a good price. The difference in this copy comes on its dust jacket. The publisher's retail price of the book has gone from $8.95 to $14.95. I notice that it has gone through several phases to get to that level. I see now that I asked earlier if the book would soon hit $20. As I mentioned there, the book has lively and delightful illustrations, here reproduced vividly. If there is a problem with Bennett's wonderful pictures, it is that the social commentary is so pointed that we lose or miss something as we view them in a different age. Bennett's witty pictures get strong reactions in slide lectures, perhaps partly for sheer visual delight.

1857/1979 Ésope: Le Renard Qui Avait la Queue Coupée et Autres Fables. Adaptée et dessinées par Bennett. Traduit par Marie-Raymond Farré. Paris?: Enfantimages: Éditions Gallimard. $2.50 at Boulinier, Paris, Aug., '88.

Beautifully reproduced colored pictures of seventeen fables from Bennett. The color work may be superior to that in editions from this country. The clever cover-picture is not included inside the book. "The Wolf in the Mirror" is on the back. A lovely find!

1857/1986 The Fables of Aesop and Others.. Translated into human nature designed and drawn on the wood by Charles H. Bennett with additional fables designed and drawn by Randolph Caldecott. Dust jacket. London: Bracken Books. $6.98 at Odegard's, Summer, '87. Extra copy for $10 from Fahrenheit's Books, Denver, April, '98.

An unusual mixing in of seven of Caldecott's fables with the twenty-two Bennett works. These latter seem less well done than in the Viking edition. There is a valuable explanation of the frontispiece, and a valuable reprint of Bennett's original title page (which includes the wolf-in-the-mirror). Caldecott's illustrations are very small here.

1857? The Oak & the Nettle. Written and Depicted by R. André. Sixteen-page booklet in colored boards. Every-day Fables #4. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge/NY: E. & J.B. Young & Co. $20 from Alibris, July, '99.

Here is the kind of surprise that fuels this collection. First, there is clearly a series of fable booklets of which I had known nothing. How many others are there? Second, this booklet presents a different pattern from those to which I am accustomed. It presents one fable and is illustrated by alternating a pair of beautifully colored full-page illustrations with a pair of monochrome illustrations. This heavily didactic fable is new to me. An old man and a boy walk through the woods. The boy wants to throw stones at all the living things moving about. The man asks the boy, if he is so strong, to pull up an oak tree. When it is clear that he cannot, the man gives him an easier task: to pull up a nettle by its roots. "I could if I could borrow gloves." The man tells him to let both tasks go. They were set to him to show him how it is with bad habits. Whether old like the oak or recent like the nettle, they are hard to uproot. The boy responds with a nice image: a bad habit is like a pair of tight boots. We have to struggle hard to get out of them. The booklet is inscribed "Wilfred" with a date that some hand has deciphered as "1857." Was chromolithography sufficiently advanced in 1857 to produce this kind of a booklet? The booklet is in good condition.

1858 Aesop's Fables Complete. Rev. T. James, M.A. Hardbound. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Co.. $15.50 from Stewart's, Middletown, DE, through eBay, August, '05. 

Here is one of my earliest Tenniel editions. From what I can gather, it should more properly be called a "Tenniel/Wolf" edition, since I think the reworked illustrations were already done in 1851. This book may be quite similar to my Lippincott edition printed in 1868. As I write there, this is a small-format James version of 203 fables on 208 pages, including a final AI. The spine of this book is giving way, and the cover has been rubbed thin. Are these pages printed from Tenniel's and Wolf's plates, or do they show someone else's copies of their work?

1858 Fables de J. LaFontaine, Édition Variorum. Publiée par M. Charles Louandre. Hardbound. Paris: Charpentier, Libraire-Éditeur. $9.99 from AnnEllen Phelps, Belfast, ME, through eBay, Sept., '06.

It is the "variorum" notes that distinguish this edition of La Fontaine's fables. The notes contain a number of passages from various commentators and other writers. Otherwise this seems to be a straightforward edition of La Fontaine's fables on some 464 pages. The title-page boasts of a "beau portrait gravé sur acier" that seems no longer to be present. The back has a table of authors and an AI. The title-page has quite a lot of material on it. Let me spin it out here: "Fables de J. La Fontaine suivies de Philémon et Baucis et des Filles de Minée précédées de la vie d'Ésope et d'une Préface par la Fontaine. Édition Variorum publiée par M. Charles Louandre accompagnée d'une notice par M. Sainte-Beuve de l'Académie Française et ornée d'un beau portrait gravé sur acier." Phew! It is exhausting just to reproduce this title! Marbled boards with some faux-leather. Inscribed in 1861.

1858 Fables Nouvelles. Eugénie et Laure Fiot. Sixieme édition, revue et augmentée. Paris: Librairie ecclésiastique, classique et élémentaire de Ch. Fouraut. $2 at The Lantern, DC, Jan., '96.

I do not know when I have had more of an experience of watching a book fall apart before my eyes. This book began in poor condition, with its cover peeling. It proceeded to peel right off in a few weeks! Now, five months later, I finally have a chance to look up this pair of siblings in Fabulists French, and I find that they are not there. The book contains eight books of seventeen fables each and a ninth of sixteen fables. Their purpose is spelled out clearly in the preface: to accustom readers (young and old) to the ideas of order and work and to inspire sentiments of virtue, devotion, and humanity. I tried two fables. III 4 has a father teaching his boy what the Aesopic tradition might call "the lesson of the filberts" and III 5 has a fox and cat outraged over a wolf's devouring of a lamb, from which the fox turns to destroying a chicken and the cat a mouse....

1858 Picture Fables. Drawn by Otto Speckter, engraved by the Brothers Dalziel. With rhymes translated from the German of F. Hey by Henry W. Dulcken. NY: George Routledge and Sons. $25 from My Book Heaven, Alameda, CA, Aug., '92.

Several fables touch on Aesopic material (e.g., "The Bat and the Bird" on 36 and "The Thief and the Dog" on 86). There is a lovely frontispiece of life with the animals. The best feature might be the drawings of inanimate objects: ham and sausage on 51 and a jug and a pail on 53. The engravings come out here much better than in One Hundred Picture Fables with Rhymes (1879?), which uses the same plates for the fables. The twelve-line tellings are trite and saccharin; the characters tend to be humans rather than beasts. Anne Stevenson Hobbs has remarked that these are really not fable material, and I tend to agree with her. The etchings by Speckter here are different from those in the original German. Is F. Hey related to Wilhelm Hey, who did the original texts?  See a later version of this book in 1864.

1858 The Parables of Frederic Adolphus Krummacher translated from the Seventh German Edition. With Forty Illustrations drawn by J.R. Clayton, Engraved by the Brothers Dalziel. Hardbound. London: Bohn's Illustrated Library: Henry G. Bohn. $7.99 from Sara Duncan, Toronto, through Ebay, June, '00.

I am surprised to find, while this book takes the translations used in my 1854 edition of the same title by Lindsay & Blakiston in Philadelphia, this version has the Dalziel brothers copying the work done there--or perhaps copying the same source which Van Ingen was copying there! This book has a smaller format but more illustrations. If one compares, it is not hard to see that the engravings are copies rather than reprints. The spine is taped. Might this book have suffered some fire damage? Its pages are brittle, and the page ends seem charred. See my comments on the 1854 edition.

1858 The Second Primary Reader; Consisting of Extracts in Prose and Verse. With Exercises in Enunciation. For the Use of the Second Classes in Primary Schools. G.S. Hillard. No illustrator acknowledged. Boston: Brewer and Tileston. $5.95 at Brattle Bookshop, Jan., '89.

In poor shape, as befits a 140-year-old book. Nine fables without illustration. The moral is different for boys and girls in FC. The cat is to be corded, not belled. There are comments on fables in #4-5 on 32-33.

1858? Fables of La Fontaine: Two Volumes in One. Translated from the French by Elizur Wright, Jr. Illustrations after Grandville. Fifth Edition. Hardbound. Boston: Bazin & Ellsworth. $1.50 from Arakel Almasian, Watertown, MA, Oct., '06.

I am happy to land this stated "Fifth Edition" of Elizur Wright's work. The only date apparent here is the "1842" on the verso of the title-page, indicating a date of entry into the clerk's office of the district court of the district of Massachusetts. It is not easy to place this book among the other early editions of Wright's work that I have. I have two from 1841, one of them a stated first American edition from Tappan and Dennet in New York and others elsewhere. This comes as two volumes in one. My other 1841 edition is a two-volume set, also from Tappan and Dennet, but it does not describe itself as a particular edition. There is a stated third edition from Tappan and Dennet in 1842. It is a pair of volumes. There is a two-volume set that describes itself as the fourth edition, published again by Tappan and Dennet. Its date is 1843. There is also a self-proclaimed fourth edition from a different publisher, Sanborn, Carter & Bazin in Boston. Might "fourth edition" here mean "fourth edition done by this publisher"? The date on this volume is 1856. There is as well a sixth edition from Tappan and Dennet in the same year of 1843. Again it is a two-volume set. There is an important printing in 1860: important, because it includes excellent reproductions of Grandville's work. This and the English publication of Boutet de Monvel in 1871 are the only occurrences of Wright in Bodemann. There is a whole grouping of editions in 1881 from Caldwell, Estes and Lauriat, and others. I am guessing that this volume is in continuity--as the next edition--with that done by Sanborn, Carter & Bazin in 1856. Notice the overlap of "Bazin" in both publishers. No illustrator is mentioned here on the title-page. The first volume ends abruptly at 247, and new pagination takes over on the next page. Each page is framed by a double-line border. There is a similar border in the edition from Sanborn, Carter & Bazin in 1856. What a bargain!

1859 A Book of Fables: Amusement for Good Little Children. Paperbound. Boston: The Rock-a-bye Library: Brown, Taggard, and Chase. $16 from Marcia Ahrens, Hennepin, IL, through eBay, May, '05. 

This is a pamphlet of 16 pages. The fables here include several that are new to me. In "The Fox and the Cock," the fox tells the cock that he has heard that he is clever and wants to ask him a riddle. A dwarf meets a giant and asks to go with him. They meet robbers, whom the giant beats with his club, but the dwarf gets beaten. The giant tells the dwarf that if he is not strong, he must not go out to battle with a giant. The moral is that we should not set ourselves up as equal to those greater and wiser than us. "The Dog and the Rat" includes the usual plea to be allowed to grow and come back to be eaten one year later. It has the unusual moral: "Check a small fault at once." A father brings home a peach for each child and the next day asks what each child has done with his peach. After the results are narrated, the fable asks "Which made the best use of his peach?" The book also questions the morality of the dog who helped eat his own master's dinner before the other thieving dogs could eat it all. A shrewd old hog tells a young pig not to be proud over the attentions that humans pay to them. More traditional fables include "The Partridge and Her Young," CJ, and DS. The pamphlet has color on its cover but a good deal of staining throughout. The sewn binding is very weak. It is curious that there is an advertisement on the inside back-cover for various books in the series "Rollo's Tour in Europe," published by "Taggard & Thompson," while this booklet is published by "Brown, Taggard, and Chase." The back cover itself advertises several series published by Brown, Taggard, and Chase, including this series, "The Rock-a-bye Library."

1859 A Greek Reader, Selected Chiefly from Jacobs' Greek Reader, Adapted to Bullions' Greek Grammar. Rev. Peter Bullions, D.D. Thirty-fifth edition, revised. Hardbound. NY: Pratt, Oakley & Company. $9.50 from Antique Market Place, Petaluma, CA, July, '00.

The very first readings offered (91-96) are twenty-two of Aesop's fables, including a last one in verse. The notes for these texts are on 218-221. See the parallel edition for Latin, listed under "1854." The publisher has changed from "Pratt, Woodford, Farmer, and Brace" to "Pratt, Oakley & Company," and the address has changed too. As in the Latin book, there is a first section on idioms and then introductory exercises. Then comes a bookful of passages, with the fables leading the way. After some of the contorting of fables that I have seen lately, it is wonderful to see fables done in two or three lines. This book has weathered some storms in its long life. Its covers are separating. This book was perhaps first published in 1853, the date on the back of the title-page. I found the two Bullion books at almost opposite ends of the USA.

1859 Fabeln, Parabeln und Erzählungen für jeden Stand und jedes Alter nebst einer Abhandlung über das Wesen und den Vortrag der Fabel. Von C.G. Rehsener, Prediger zu Memel. Hardbound. Memel. DM 50 from Historica Antiquariat, Dresden, June, '98.

I have learned that Memel was formerly a city in East Prussia and is now Klaipida in Lithuania. This book begins with a subscriber list. Though the circumstances are surely different, I suspect that it was what we would call "privately published." It contains 550 stories on 214 pages. Following that, true to the long title, there is a discussion on fable and its mode of presentation. This is a remarkable book by a preacher. The "Vorrede" makes clear that these fables arose occasionally and unsought over the years. Almost all are new. The twelve or so that rely on older fables have carried out the story differently. There are twenty-six chapters, and only one of them is meant for children. This preface recognizes that more strictly Aesopic fables are mixed here with parables and narratives of similar content. The writer's hope is that no friend of truth and harmless humor will set the book down unsatisfied. Chapters are given titles like "Religion," "Freedom," "Wisdom and Recognition," and "Love and Kindness." There is a great first story about Aesop and the Phrygians. Rehsener uses it well to suggest that fable wants not to moralize but to bring it about that people themselves moralize. For Aesop was rejected by the Phrygians, went into the desert and preached to the animals and other creatures there, and the Phygians came with pleasure to listen to him. They thought that they had found the truth themselves. A second part of this story clarifies that nature is rich in answers, but it depends how we ask the questions. I have only sampled the fables. They seem somewhat forced. The best of those I have read is perhaps that of the trees and the oasis. Some bad philosophers claimed that only bearing fruit makes for virtue. Wise trees answered that the first virtue is to stand on holy ground like that of the oasis. I would enjoy doing more with this book.

1859 Fabler af Aesop ved Christian Winther.  Efter den engelste Bearbeidelse af Thomas James M.A.  Illustrations by John Tenniel, NA.  Hardbound.  Copenhagen: P.G. Philipsens Forlag.  150 Kroner from Vangsgaards Antikvariat, Copenhagen, July, '14.  

1859 Fables de J. la Fontaine. Avec des notes de tous les commentateurs. Chefs-d'oeuvre littéraires du xviie siècle. Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot Fréres, Fils et Cie. $20 at Book Stop, Albuquerque, May, '93.

Perhaps the loveliest non-illustrated LaFontaine in this collection. The careful owners in this last, unexpected Albuquerque stop did not know that they had this book. Very good condition. Calf binding with marbled covers, endpapers, and edges. The bottom-of-the-page notes look helpful. From the publishers of l'Institut de France, one would expect a lovely book like this.

1859 Fables de La Fontaine.  J.J. Grandville.  Hardbound.  Paris: Garnier Frères, Libraires-Éditeurs.  $60 from Second Story Books Warehouse, Rockville, MD, Jan., '16.

1859 Fables of Aesop and Others Translated into English with Instructive Applications and One Hundred and Ninety-Eight Illustrations. By Samuel Croxall. Hardbound. NY: Derby & Jackson. $15 from Dan Understahl, West Baden, Indiana, through Ebay, Jan., '00.

Here is one of many cheap reprintings with new illustrations of the Croxall edition of 1722. Perhaps the first thing to notice about this edition is that the dedication to Lord Halifax has been dropped. The preface's "Britain" (xvii) is changed to "America" and its "British youth" (xviii) to "charming youth." The frontispiece is again in design what it had been in the earliest Croxall editions: a young man surrounded by animals as he writes looks over his shoulder to Aesop as an old man. The illustrations are imitations of Kirkall's, simpler and mirror-reversed (as they were in Mozley's editions of 1804 and 1807), but all in the "oval within a rectangle" style. The non-image portion of the rectangle becomes simpler and less ornate than it was in Kirkall's work. There are 196 fables on 351 pages, preceded by a preface and an AI and followed by an index of themes and virtues. This copy is in poor condition, with a crumbling spine. The book promises 198 illustrations. I reckon that there is one for each of the 196 fables, and there is the standard frontispiece facing the title-page. Where is the other illustration? Inscribed in 1862. This book is identical in its plates (but not its quality) with my two Burnham editions of 1863 and 1864. See my notes there.

1859 L'Art de Lire les Fables.  J.T. de Saint-Germain.  Hardbound.  Paris: Jules Tardieu.  €35 from Wortfreunde, Mannheim, July, '19.

1859 Recueil de Fables et Contes en Patois Saintongeais. H. Burgaud des Marets. Troisième Édition, revue et augmentée. Hardbound. Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot Frères et Fils. $100 from Teresa Johanson, Baltimore, August, '11.

The title goes on "Avec la Traduction en Regard." This sturdy little book (3¾" x 5½") contains some fifteen bilingual fables. They seem to be done after La Fontaine. Shapiro's The Fabulists French offers a good introduction to Burgaud de Marets. A lawyer by non-passionate trade, apparently, he was a bibliophile, poet, and especially a promoter of the folklore, culture, and language of his own Saintonge area of France. This work represents the height of his production in this dialect. Shapiro presents, with translation, two of the works that appear here: GA (26) and ""La Femme et le Secret" (70). Both show their own clever deviations from La Fontaine. There are several illustrations here, and they are good. Besides a repeated motif of a farmer plowing, there are good illustrations for GA (24) and WL (60). There are three other texts after the fables. 127 pages, with a following page of T of C. 

1860 A Century of Fables in Verse, For the Most Part Paraphrased or Imitated from Various Languages. By W.R. Evans. Hardbound. Printed in London. London: Robert Hardwicke. £22 from St. Mary's Books & Prints, Stamford, Lincolnshire, UK, through ABE, June, '00.

There are some things not to miss in this little work. First, there is an unusual list of subscribers at the back. After some very careful reflections on how a person would come to write a book like this, the author sets forth that he needs the money for the books involved in his further studies. He is only a carpenter's son and has been working in the printer's trade since he was thirteen. His literary pursuits have to be done after hours. The T of C at the beginning gives the author of each fable, but note Evans' insistence that he has often gone beyond his sources. "Century" here refers to the total of one hundred fables, not to a time-period. I note some curiosities in the hundred fables here. In the first, "Truth and Fable" has become "Truth and Fiction." TB here (20) involves two hunters who spend three days running up a bill at the lodge while seeking the bear. They finally promise the bearskin as payment for their room and board. In fact, one gets off a shot and then climbs a tree. The other's gun fails, and he must lie down as though dead. The bear's advice here is not to sell a bear's skin until they have killed the bear. Each of the fifty odd lines of "The Old Man and Death" (26) ends in "-ing." The fox in FWT is asked to turn in order for the other foxes to "see/If you without a tail display/A better shape than we" (54). Among the fables, I find "The Dancing Bear" (14) particularly well done, with a pithy moral. Also good are "The Ass and the Flute" (42), "The Wolf and the Hedgehog" (61), and Gellert's "The Cuckoo" (74). A couple of short put-downs are also well done: "The Hawk and the Thrush" (89) and "The Swan and the Drake" (93). This is a book I would recommend to someone who wants to read verse renditions of something other than just the most standard fables from the tradition. It is quite a good little book.

1860 Child's Own Fable Book. Including Aesop's Fables (I) and Fables (II). Texts from Thomas James and James Northcote (NA). Illustrations after James Tenniel and James Northcote (NA). Hardbound. NY: Leavitt and Allen. $75 from Titcomb's Bookshop, East Sandwich, MA, Feb., '02.

This fat little book is an earlier (even first?) edition of a work I had found previously and have listed under "1870?" This work, like that, will delight those tracking fable publication. A frontispiece from Weir introduces a book with Thomas James' 1848 introduction placed (Theddington Vicarage) but not signed. James' 203 fables in I (not acknowledged as his) are illustrated chiefly (solely?) by illustrations after James Tenniel (not acknowledged). Part II presents 114 fables (T of C at the rear) in a variety of textual and artistic forms. Many are signed "J.N." (James Northcote), and the illustrations with them are those of Northcote's 1857 edition. There is a misprint on 251 of the second part: cvi for cxiv. Though this copy is in good to fair condition, some of its illustrations are not as definitively printed as one would want. Inscribed in 1893. The cover features a blindfolded figure among children.

1860 Fables of La Fontaine. Illustrated by J.J. Grandville. Translated by Elizur Wright, Jr. NY: Derby and Jackson. $35 from First Folio of Buchanan, TN, at Dearborn St. Fair, June, '88.

One of the loveliest books I have. The leather, the gilding, and especially the illustrations are first-class. AI on xli (facing a great engraving of the animals at LaFontaine's tomb). Lovely title pages. Unfortunately there are only about eighteen of the spectacular full-page engravings, still with their French titles.

1860 Fables of La Fontaine. Vol. I.  Translated by Elizur Wright.  J.J. Grandville.  Hardbound.  NY: Derby and Jackson.  $4.99 from postcardsandnaps through eBay, May, '18.

1860 Fables of La Fontaine. Vol. II.  Translated by Elizur Wright.  J.J. Grandville.  Hardbound.  NY: Derby and Jackson.  $4.99 from postcardsandnaps through eBay, May, '18.

1860 Fables Original and Selected (Cover: "Northcote's Fables"). James Northcote. Hardbound. London: G. Routledge and Co. £9.99 from Newton, London, through eBay, Nov., '11.

Thirty-four years ago I was given the 1857 reprinting of Volume 2 of Northcote's poetry by David Dreis. Now here is an apparent second printing of that work. The front cover, separated, features a design between the words "Northcote's" and "Fables." The designs seem to include a pillar toped by a crowned lion's head, a medallion presenting FS and a figure either writing or painting. Northcote wrote and illustrated a first volume of fables in 1828, published by Lawford, and a second in 1833, published by Murray. Both contain 280 illustrations. I have an 1829 second printing of the first and an 1833 first-edition of the second. I also have a reprinting in 1850 of the former volume by Darling. The 1857 Dreis volume (Routledge) was, then, a reprinting of the 1833 volume, only now with 275 illustrations. This present volume seems to be, with its 275 illustrations, a reprinting of the latter. Bodemann calls the illustrations in the 1857 edition "Nachdrücke," presumably of the 1833 edition. Bodemann counts 101 illustrations, 101 initials, and 71 end-vignettes. The title-page's portrait of Northcote and the end-vignette for the beginning AI bring the total up to 275 illustrations.

1860 Funny Fables for Little Folks. By Frances Freeling Broderip. With Illustrations by her Brother, Thomas Hood. Hardbound. Printed in London. London: Griffith and Farran. £15 from Abbey Antiquarian, August, '00.

These stories extend beyond fables, I believe. I read the first, "The Foolish Crab," which in its thirteen pages works nicely to show the foolishness of envy. A crab learns that, while he looks foolish trying to go straight ahead, he can go either right or left at considerable speed, while some animals can go only forward. The titles of the other nine stories in this 98-page book seem to put them outside the territory of fables. There are 32 pages of advertisements at the end, with this work advertised on 6. The author was the daughter of Thomas Hood.

1860 Reynard the Fox after the German Version of Goethe. Thomas James Arnold. With Illustrations from the Designs of Wilhelm von Kaulbach. Hardbound. London: Truebner & Co. $45 from Truman & Suzanne Price, Columbia Basin Books, Monmouth, OR, May, '03. 

Here is a lovely old edition in full leather with marbled endpapers. I have not taken time with the text at this point. I enjoy the illustrations too much. These seem to be slightly changed imitations of Kaulbach's work. My favorite illustration may have been toned down here: the cat attacks the local priest, as his horrified mistress looks on (43). The preface claims that this publication marks the first time that Kaulbach has been reproduced in England (v). That preface notes that Kaulbach's work appeared first in 1846 and that those illustrations were republished in reduced size by Cotta in 1857. This edition is taken from that Cotta edition. I am surprised to see the preface touting this book as available "at a moderate price" (v). Fable material comes in clearly in the illustrations of horse and wolf (132) and of wolf and crane (172). Stamped and inscribed at the end of the preface as belonging to Edward A. Le Roy in 1872.

1860 The Fables of Aesop with Instructive Applications Illustrated with One Hundred Engravings. Samuel Croxall. Hardbound. Printed in Halifax. Halifax: Milner and Sowerby. £16 from Beverley Old Bookshop, Beverley, England, August, '01.

This seems to be a reprint of the book I have listed under 1843. The publisher has changed from "William Milner" to "Milner and Sowerby." The indication of the same as printer at the bottom of the last page no longer includes "Cheapside." This book has a red cloth cover with some letters of the title barely legible on the spine. Several bits of typeface show the result of wear, like the "2" at the beginning of the number 211 for the last item in the T of C. The lovely fold-out frontispiece is identical but differently folded. See my comments there. It took this book for me to learn that Halifax is in Yorkshire.

1860 The Fables of Babrius. In Two Parts. Translated into English Verse from the Text of Sir G.C. Lewis by the Rev. James Davies. London: Lockwood and Co. $17.50 from Carl Sandler Berkowitz, April, '95.

Pleasing rhymed couplets, in which Davies succeeds in his effort to keep the fables terse. This translation is mentioned in Perry's Babrius and Phaedrus (lxxii). It is the first translation into English after the great manuscript discoveries of Babrius and the publication of editions in Paris in 1844, Berlin in 1845, and Oxford in 1846. There are 129 fables in the first part here and 95 in the second. The second part is done apparently from an 1859 edition of the second part of Babrius by Lewis and may have a number of questionable texts. Perry's edition of Babrius contains only 143 fables in all. There are notes to all the fables on 223-31. Some pages are uncut.

1860/2009 Fables (1860): Jean de La Fontaine. (Elizur Wright). Paperbound. NY: General Books LLC. AU$19.99 from The Nile, Australia, through eBay, August, '10.

Perhaps copied from the second volume of an 1860 edition by Derby and Jackson, which I have in one volume purchased from First Folio of Buchanan, TN, in June, 1988. Becoming acquainted with this publication has been disturbing to me. To judge from the product, the book was quickly and poorly scanned and edited. That it indeed comes from a Derby and Jackson publication seems clear from the garbled rendition of the scanned colophon on the verso of the title-page, where "PERBY I JAl-KSOS" appears. The editor did not bother to check the scan against the original. My next issue came when I read what immediately follows, the dedication to Madame de Montespan. That dedication comes at the beginning of Book VII of La Fontaine's fables. This volume does not bother to reproduce titles like "Book VII." It offers rather seventeen "sections." Is a section a break perceived by the scanning machine? This book thus gives no indication that it is the second of two volumes. The next disappointment to a reader will come when she or he encounters on page 9 the first of many cases in which La Fontaine's poetry is rendered as prose, with several lines run together without any indication that they are poetry. In case the reader needs a final disappointment, he may with a chuckle read the pasted-in library listing on 228-29, now rendered as though it were part of the book: "RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED," followed by "LOAN DEPT." The scanner was adept enough to pick up that the due time for the last of the book's borrowers was 8 pm on July 1, 1979. This book gives a frightening glimpse of what publishing may come to in the future! It has made me grateful for the care that good publishers give their books.

1860/90? Phaedri Augusti Liberti Fabularum Aesopiarum Libri Quinque. Baltimore: The Baltimore Publishing Co. $2.95 at Downtown Books Volume II, May, '93.

Formerly the possession of the Holy Ghost Fathers and the Divine Word Seminary, both in East Troy, Wisconsin. A very simple and handy text, apparently complete, including ten appendix fables and an AI on 93-6. No notes or vocabulary. A moral is given in a separate not-from-Phaedrus Latin phrase before the title, which consists naturally of the characters. One paragraph on the life of Phaedrus on 3. See 1860/1910? for a later reprint of this book by a different publisher. This volume, by contrast with that, has a statement on 2 about being entered according to an Act of Congress.

1860/1910? Phaedri Augusti Liberti Fabularum Aesopiarum Libri Quinque. Baltimore: John Murphy Company. $2.95 at Downtown Books Volume II, May, '93.

Formerly the possession of the Divine Word Seminary in East Troy, Wisconsin. Book history investigators will find much here. This book uses the same plates used earlier (1860/90?) by a different publisher (Baltimore Publishing Company) with the same insignia as this publisher. They have different addresses. One can see the plates wearing out here, in the Æ of PHAEDRUS and the first I of LIBRI on the title page and in bad spots on 58 and 65. This book lacks the "entering statement" on 2 and so every statement of date. For more comment see the 1860/90? edition.

1860? A Treasure House of Fables Instructive and Entertaining. Collected and Edited by G. Moir Bussey. Illustrated by Grandville. Hardbound. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co./ Glasgow: Thomas D. Morison. £17.50 from Abbey Antiquarian, August, '94.

Here is a fascinating knockoff of the earlier and lovelier Fables Original and Selected, published by Willoughby in 1842. This book lists on its title-page the authors from whom texts are being taken. It turns out to be a long list: "Aesop, Phaedrus, Pilpay, La Fontaine, Dodsley, Florian, Addison, Fenelon, Gray, Lessing, Northcote, Nivernois, Goldsmith, Yriarte, Aikin, Gellert, Croxall, &c., &c., &c." Even Florian's "Don Quixote" shows up here, as it did in the parent work. The only illustrations here are twenty-three plates, listed on 24. As in the parent volume, there is an AI at the front. This book apparently drops some texts from the original volume; it uses the same versions as are found there. It is remarkable for the ugly typeface used for the titles of the fables. This book is not divided, as is the parent volume, into four books. There are some pages of advertisements at the back. The introduction seems to have been brought over intact except for several paragraphs just before the last paragraph. There are some uncut pages here. See my comments on the parent volume and on the 1842 Willoughby and 1863 Appleton copies.

1860? Aesop's Fables. Chiefly from Original Sources. Rev. Thomas James. With more than One Hundred Illustrations Designed by John Tenniel. NY: The Platt & Peck Co. $51.60 from David Morrison, Portland, July, '93.

A small edition with a crazy colored frontispiece of a fox and a grapevine; this art doubles as the front cover decoration. All of Tenniel's 108 engravings are here; this edition counts SW for two illustrations, whereas my 1848 edition lists the same illustrations as one. This may be the best small Tenniel I have. Might it be close to an American first edition? Is it worth what I paid for it? List of illustrations on v-viii. AI at the back of the book.

1860? Aesop's Fables. Paperbound. Dayton, OH: B.F. Ells. $9.99 from Lisa Baker, Kettering, OH, through eBay, April, '04. 

This is a 32-page pamphlet about 3½" x 5" with thin paper covers and a sewn ribbon binding. Unfortunately 21-28 are missing here. On both covers a young girl sits with a book spread in her lap. As it is, there are eleven large illustrations in the remaining pages, one for each fable. They are surprisingly clear, even if they sometimes present just the characters and not the necessary interaction or event. Each fable also has an application. I suppose that that fact is a tribute to Samuel Croxall. This pamphlet is in poor condition. It is coming up on 150 years of age.

1860? Child's Book of Fables. Paperbound. NY: Leavitt & Allen. $24.99 from an anonymous seller through eBay, Sept., '03. 

Both the cover and the identical first illustration in this fragile little eight-page pamphlet have been colored, though with different color schemes. An older man holds a book and perhaps reads from it while two children stand and listen. The fables included are FS, WL, WC, and DW. Each gets an exquisite little illustration colored presumably by hand. If an amateur did the coloring, she or he did it very well! The green paper cover is not thick. The book measures slightly more than 2" x 3". This book has done well to last this long! It is an exquisite little treasure.

1860? Fables de La Fontaine.  Illustrees par (Auguste) Hadamard.  Hardbound.  Paris: J. Vermot, Libraire-Éditeur.  $95 from International BookSales, Inc., Dover, NH, through eBay, July, '15.  

1860? Fables de La Fontaine.  Hardbound.  Dole: Prudont, Editeur.  €35 from Librairie le bateau ivre, Montolieu, France, through Ebay, April, '22.

1860? Fables for Children (Cover: Picture Fables).   Hardbound.  NY: Leavitt and Allen.  $52 from The Wild Muse Granville, NY, March, '19.

1860? Pictures & Fables For the Young. Hand-colored. Paperbound. NY: Philip J. Cozans. $29.99 from Robin Nash, North Tonawanda, NY, through eBay, April, '12.

Cozans was at the specific address given here, 107 Nassau Street, from 1855 to 1861. This eight-page booklet -- including the inner covers -- is 10" x 6¾". The outstanding feature of this booklet consists in the hand-colored illustrations, one to a page. There are rather grossly done, but they probably offer a good view of how such coloring was done. The lion's face in the last story is typically human; lions were the hardest for many artists to portray, perhaps because they had never seen a lion. The stories are in rhyming couplets. They are heavily admonitory. We should avoid idleness and make ourselves useful. Pets are sychophants. Do not wander too far from home. What you despise as you look into a mirror may be yourself. The obverse of each interior page is neither printed nor painted.

1860? The Children's Picture Fable-Book Containing One Hundred and Sixty Fables. With Sixty Illustrations by Harrison Weir. First edition? Hardbound. London/NY: George Routledge and Sons. $40 from Alibris, Sept., '00.

Hobbs gives 1860 as the date of the first edition of this work, by Routledge. Might this be it? The book is slightly larger in format than my 1861 Harper & Brothers edition. See my notes there. This edition features FK on its cover, with some lovely gold embossing. The pages show some finger and dampstain soiling, but I find the book and especially the lovely Weir illustrations in good condition. Among the best illustrations are CJ (frontispiece and 19), DS (11), "The Eagle and the Fox" (57), TB (91), "The Dog, the Cock, and the Fox" (179), and "The Kid and the Wolf" (209). There is a list of illustrations at the front and an AI at the back. A quick search does not reveal the source of the texts.

1860? The Little Esop. Hardbound. Boston: G.W. Cottrell. $31.03 from Betty Everett, Norwalk, CT, through Ebay, Feb., '00.

Inscribed in 1863. Good condition. This little volume uses the title, title-page design, and other elements from previous The Little Esop works that I have listed under "1844," "1846," and "1848." But the book has been reconceived. Formerly 191 pages long, it is now 96 pages. The page size is slightly larger, 3" x almost 4". The illustrations are the same, but now each is surrounded by one of four or five standard printers' frames. Even the texts and versions are the same, though the typesetting is new. This copy of the book is in good condition, but the illustrations have bled through onto the text pages. Notice that the cover and spine have Little Aesop while the title-page has The Little Esop.

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1861 Chr. F. Gellert's sämtliche Fabeln und Erzählungen in drei Büchern. Mit zwölf Illustrationen von H. Leutemann. Volks-Ausgabe. Hardbound. Leipzig: Hahn'sche Buchhandlung. €20 from Antiquariat Müller & Gräff, Stuttgart, August, '09.

This book is similar to but apparently seriously antedates an edition by the same publisher for which I have guessed a date of 1910. That edition claimed on its title-page "Nach den ältesten Ausgaben." It was a "Neue Ausgabe" as opposed to this "Volks- Ausgabe." It had fifteen illustrations as against the twelve here, and its frontispiece was Roth's portrait of Gellert. Here the frontispiece is "Damokles." The publisher is here only in Leipzig; there he adds Hannover. The Vorwort there is four pages long; here it is only two. There is here an identical beginning T of C. I decided for that Gellert edition to examine the first eight illustrated fables, and I will repeat here what I found. "Der Tanzbär" (2) presents a bear who has had to dance for his living; now he breaks away and rejoins the bears. He shows them his new skills. They try to do the same and fail. Soon they ask him to leave. Show skill and people will talk about you, and soon envy will follow, and your talent will become a crime. Also illustrated is "Das Gespenst" (17): you can use poetry, even or especially bad poetry, to drive away ghosts! "Der Hund" (22) tells of a miserly dog that, even in death, will not give up his treasured bones. "Der Bettler" (27) gives us a beggar; with a sword in his hand and a plea for compassion, he is like the writer who pays compliments and says that he trusts our sense of justice--but also uses threats. "Die zärtliche Frau" (39) is about a woman who at her husband's deathbed cries out "Death, come and take me!" When death shows up and asks if someone called, she points to her husband and says that he called. "Damokles" (53) is straightforward and true to the ancient anecdote. "Der grüne Esel" (61) is the story of instant notoriety and fast movement into being passé. "Die kranke Frau" (71) presents a woman who cannot be healed by doctors but only by a tailor's new dress! Because of its good illustration, I gave myself a bonus: "Der beherzte Entschluss" (127). It is worth it! A condemned man finds an old spinster pleading for him. The judge says that he will spare him if he will marry her. The prisoner choses death and asks the judge to kill him now. Canvas spine. 

1861 Fabeln und poetische Erzählungen von Gottl(ieb) Conr(ad) Pfeffel in Auswahl.  Herausgegeben von H(errmann) Hauff.  Hardbound.  Stuttgart und Tübingen: Cotta.  €19 from Burgverlag Buchhandelsgeschäft, Vienna, May, '14.

1861 Gems of Fable. Edited by J.H.B.. Hardbound. Miniature. Buffalo: Breed, Butler & Co. Gift of Bill Conwell, Portland, OR, July, '03.

Here is a wonderful little gift! I had not heard of the book before. It has 96 small (2¼" x 3") pages. The tone of the fables is decidedly virtuous, as one might expect. Besides Aesop, the acknowledged sources for this mixture of prose and verse fables include "Flowers of Fable," Peter Parley, Pope and Cowper. Several of the fables here are new to me: "The Court of Death," "The Humming-Bird and the Butterfly," "The Fly in St. Paul's Cupola," "The Dog and the Crane," and "The Retired Cat" (who got closed up in a dresser drawer). Gold embossed title on green cloth covers. This is a fragile little gem in itself!

1861 The Bee and the Wasp. A Fable in Verse with Illustrations Designed and Etched by George Cruikshank. Preface is signed by "R.F." Otherwise authorship is unclear. London: Basil Montagu Pickering. $15 at Dan Behnke, Chicago, Sept., '90.

A pleasing enough elongated fable with four good Cruikshank engravings. The wasp lures the bee into sin; by the end everyone, including the bee's wife and children, is dead. There is even time for a song and a chorus. This may be a good example of the popularity which "fable" once had as an effective contemporary literary genre. This booklet is in good condition for something 130 years old.

1861 The Book of Good Counsels from the Sanskrit of the "Hitopadesa". By Sir Edwin Arnold. With Illustrations by Harrison Weir. Signed by Edwin Arnold. Hardbound. London: Smith, Elder and Co. $75 from William Dailey Rare Books, Los Angeles, August, '02. 

I already have a more recent edition using Arnold's translation, with the illustrations of Gordon Brown, published by W.H. Allen in 1896. Here is a much earlier edition with illustrations by Harrison Weir. In fact, there are only four illustrations; they are listed opposite the opening T of C. The most successful of the illustrations may be "The Old Hare and the Elephants" (87). The seller describes it as a first edition and notes that it is signed by the author/translator on the front flyleaf. Dailey also notes the fine binding by Blackwell. Let me repeat, with page numbers appropriate to this edition, some of my comments from the Allen edition of 1896. This seems to be a good standard telling of the Hitopadesa. The opening T of C lists individual fables. In this version the merchant brings his wife on the second evening of the month of arranged assignations (41); it takes him only one viewing to be greedy to get the gifts that the king gave the woman of the first evening. The crow and the rat walk to the tortoise's pond. At the beginning of the second chapter, "Lusty-Life" the bull breaks a foreleg. In the story of the monkey and wedge, his tail and lower parts dangle down between the pieces of wood (49). Lusty-Life is put in charge of provisions when the jackals are discovered to be consuming and disposing of more than their share of the kill. This second chapter ends with the killing of the bull. What happens to the jackals is not addressed. In this version, the wheelwright duped by his wife hidden in his wife's chamber hears her praise of him and rushes out of hiding to ask her lover if he had ever seen a truer wife than this (92)! In the third chapter, "War," the swan ("Silversides") has as his main minister a goose, and the inciting incident is that a crane from his kingdom happens to fly in peacock territory. This crane is sent back as a spy, and a paddy-bird, a form of crane, is commissioned to fortify the fortress. The peacock has a vulture for a minister, a cock for a general, and a parrot for an ambassador. A crow also shows up as a guest at the swan's court. The parrot commands obeisance or withdrawal from Camphor-island. King Swan refuses. The peacock advances rashly against the swan-people, contrary to the vulture's advice. The crane and his fellows wreak havoc on the peacock's realm. The crows are indeed traitors and burn the besieged citadel of the swan-king. The paddy-bird defends the king in the last hour and helps him escape but dies himself. The peacock captures the fortress. In the fourth book, the swan king first ascertains whose treason had cost him the loss of his fort, namely that of the crows. The two kings end up creating a good peace. The inserted verses are done in rhyme. This edition does a nice job with the names of individual animals and towns. There are notes at the back.

1861 The Children's Picture Fable-Book Containing One Hundred and Sixty Fables. With Sixty Illustrations by Harrison Weir. First US edition? Hardbound. NY: Harper & Brothers. $75 from Jeffrey H. Marks Rare Books, Rochester, NY, June, '10.

I have been very fortunate to find this second, brown-covered copy of a work which I already have in defective form. As I note under that 1861 book, found at Emerald City Fine Books, Eugene, OR, by mail in September of 1998, pages 65-112 are missing in that copy. Here they are present, and so I am happy to create a new listing for this copy. The bookseller was worried that several hand-colored pages would disappoint me enough to make me reject the book! FG on 6 is multi-colored with a very dark fox, and OF on 65 has splotches of pink. Notice that I paid the same $75 for both copies of the book. Let me include some of my remarks on that copy. Hobbs gives 1860 as the date of the first edition of this work, by Routledge. Perhaps this is a first or second American edition. She rightly calls these wood engravings sensitive. I think they are among Weir's best work. It also seems to be his earliest published fable work. The book's format is small (5¼" x 6¾"), the illustrations occupy a full page each, and the print is large and bold. The book seems well conceived for younger readers. This copy lacks a strip of cloth almost a half-inch high on the bottom of its spine. Among the best illustrations are CJ (frontispiece and 19), "The Fox and the Goat" (2), DS (11), "The Eagle and the Fox" (57), BW (79), TB (91), WSC (99), "The Dog, the Cock, and the Fox" (179), and "The Kid and the Wolf" (209). There is a list of illustrations at the front and an AI at the back. A quick search does not reveal the source of the texts.

1861 The Children's Picture Fable-Book Containing One Hundred and Sixty Fables. With Sixty Illustrations by Harrison Weir. First US edition? Hardbound. Printed in USA. NY: Harper & Brothers. $75 from Emerald City Fine Books, Eugene, OR, by mail, Sept., '98.

Hobbs gives 1860 as the date of the first edition of this work, by Routledge. Perhaps this is a first or second American edition. She rightly calls these wood engravings sensitive. I think they are among Weir's best work. It also seems to be his earliest published work. The book's format is small (5¼" x 6¾"), the illustrations occupy a full page each, and the print is large and bold. The book seems well conceived for younger readers. Unfortunately, the book lacks 65-112 and the ten illustrations contained in those pages. There is fairly frequent foxing and staining. Among the best illustrations are CJ (frontispiece and 19), DS (11), "The Eagle and the Fox" (57), "The Dog, the Cock, and the Fox" (179), and "The Kid and the Wolf" (209). "The Lion and the Bulls" (65), FS (142), and "The Wolf and the Horse" (159) have been garishly colored. Inscribed in 1866. There is a list of illustrations at the front and an AI at the back. A quick search does not reveal the source of the texts.

1861 The Mother's Fables in Verse, A New Edition, To Which Is Added (for the first time) Tales and Fables in Verse. By E.L. Aveline. With Illustrations by William Harvey. Hardbound. Printed in London. London: James Hogg & Sons.  $7 from Arnold Zogry, Warren, MA, through Ebay, April, '99. Extra copy for $10, July, '98.

The preface to this new edition speaks of the popularity of "The Mother's Fables" on their first publication nearly half a century earlier. Each of the twenty-eight pieces in the first section ("The Mother's Fables") is a double piece. A child does something, and mother responds by telling a fable that fits the action of the child. Thus the first story is "The Mimic," within which mother tells "The Mocking Bird." Her child should stop making fun of others or she--like the mocking bird--will have no friends. The third story is pictured in the frontispiece. In it a young man who thinks he has learned everything hears from his mother the story "The Partridge and Her Young" in which one young partridge tries, against his mother's will, to fly too soon. Obedience seems to be the all-encompassing virtue here! The second section ("Tales and Fables in Verse") includes among its forty-nine items several attributed to others like Gellert. There seem to be many moral stories here to which one can easily append a sub-title naming a virtue. Thus one item is named "The Antelope" and has the subtitle "Curiosity." The antelope is escaping the wolf until she gets curious about what kind of animal he is. The last few lines have the poet bidding farewell to the wretched antelope as curiosity's victim. There are only a few illustrations along the way. The extra copy shows several differences. Most importantly, it was printed not by Harrild in London but by the Camden Press in London. It has a brown rather than a purple cloth cover, though the gold imprint is the same. The bottom third of the spine is missing, and the back cover is loose.

1862 Esopus von Burkhard Waldis, Erster Theil. Herausgegeben und mit Erläuterungen versehen von Heinrich Kurz. Hardbound. Leipzig: Deutsche Bibliothek: Verlagsbuchhandlung von J.J. Weber. DM 19 from Zentralantiquariat, Leipzig, July, '95.

This is a little treasure which I would not have expected to find. For Waldis' original work, see Bodemann's Fabula Docet #15. This edition by Kurz is the one bibliographical work referenced in that item. Cataloguing the book has given me a chance to learn a little about Waldis. He lived from about 1490 to about 1556. Kurz believes that Waldis himself probably took part in the preparation of the first three editions of his Aesop in 1548, 1555, and 1557. Kurz uses the third (1557) as his basis here. Waldis began writing fables earlier, perhaps even before 1533. Kurz believes that Waldis' basic sources included Mathias Schurer for his Latin Aesop (1516 in Strassburg); either one edition without place or year and Steinhöwel or both; Aphthonius in Latin, Romulus, and the Anonymous Neveleti. He did not have Phaedrus, who was first published in 1596. Other sources name Martin Dorp as his chief source. There are three books of 100 traditional fables, and then a fourth book of 100 of Waldis' own fables. Waldis had a painful conversion from Roman Catholicism through a trip to Rome. Apparently he had been imprisoned for his Catholicism. He gave up his status as a Franciscan monk and converted to Protestantism. He became a tinsmith, traveled a good deal, and had a stormy marriage with a widow, which ended up in a separation. Apparently these experiences play out in his fables, namely a reaction against Roman religious frivolity and against women. After a second time in prison, he studied for the Protestant ministry and then undertook it. A second marriage was happier. According to Bodemann, the only illustration in Waldis' original work was the frontispiece; it seems to appear here on 1, which seems to be the title-page of the 1557 edition. This rhyming-verse collection begins with a life of Aesop. This book's 422 pages contain Waldis' first three books. Besides the texts, there are a few vocabulary footnotes. A reading of the first two fables, CJ and WL, shows what commentators describe, namely, that Waldis loves proverbs--even many of them--for making his points in the moral of the fable, which is marked here with a paragraph sign.

1862 Esopus von Burkhard Waldis, Zweiter Theil. Herausgegeben und mit Erläuterungen versehen von Heinrich Kurz. Hardbound. Leipzig: Deutsche Bibliothek: Verlagsbuchhandlung von J.J. Weber. DM 19 from Zentralantiquariat, Leipzig, July, '95.

See my comments on the first part of this two-part work. This second part contains first Book 4. Waldis' own title is "Das Vierdte Buch der Fabeln Esopi hat Hundert newer Fabeln" (1). This fourth book with its longer fables takes some 299 pages. It is followed by a T of C for both parts, listing each of the fables. What follows next is Waldis' "Ein warhafftige Historien von Zweyen Mewssen" followed by three fables. Then, separately paginated as a unit over some 230 pages, there are the following: Lesarten, Amnerkungen, and Wörterverzeichniss, with a final T of C for the whole two-part work. I read through the first of the hundred fables in Book 4. The fox and wolf decide to go to Rome to get remission of their sins. On their way, the ass joins them. Somewhere in the Alps, the former two start complaining about the long and difficult trip and suggest that their sins could be just as well forgiven with confession and penance here. The ass, as usual, goes along with all that they say. Wolf and fox confess major sins of aggression against animals and humans and receive understanding responses from each other. I believe that the fox gives the wolf a penance of eating only what he finds within three paces of water. Then the ass confesses once eating some straw that his driver had put into his shoe to close up a hole. The other two are outraged at this huge crime and proclaim it better that the ass physically die for this otherwise unforgiveable sin. Waldis makes clear the point that we should not be taken in by wolf and fox types around us. The upper part of this book's outer spine has separated.

1862 The Children's Picture Fable-Book Containing One Hundred and Sixty Fables. With Sixty Illustrations by Harrison Weir. False. True. Printed in London. London: Sampson Low, Son, & Co. $12.50 from Doris Larson, Little Falls, MN, through Ebay, 1/00.

This book is an inexpensive reprint of the Routledge first edition of the book with the same title in 1860. See my comments under "1860?" It looks to me as though the publisher simply bought or rented the illustration plates from Routledge. Weir's signature is on the illustrations, and he is acknowledged on the title-page. The plates for the text-pages are new and different from those in both the Routledge edition and the 1861 Harper & Brothers edition. See my comments there too. This edition shares with the Routledge edition the illustration of FK on the cover. It shows up much better there against a red background than here against blue. Again among the best illustrations are CJ (frontispiece and 19), "The Eagle and the Fox" (57), TB (91), "The Dog, the Cock, and the Fox" (179), and "The Kid and the Wolf" (209). Besides the list of illustrations at the front there is an AI at the back. The margins are very small in this 5½" x 6¾" book. Pages 11-12 are missing. The book once belonged to a "Maria Immaculata Academy."

1862? The Child's Picture Fable-Book In Easy Words mostly of one Syllable (pre-title page: The Children's Picture Fable Book). With 59 Illustrations by Harrison Weir. Hardbound. One-Syllable Books. London: George Routledge and Sons. £ 38 from Rose's Books, Hay-on-Wye, Feb., '02.

This book in excellent condition seems to represent a use of Weir's illustrations, which first appeared in The Children's Picture Fable-Book Containing One Hundred and Sixty Fables in 1860. See my copies dated "1860?" and "1861" and "1862." This book has a larger page-format and only some fifty-eight fables. One of the sixty illustrations used there is not used here. As far as I can ascertain, the sixtieth, unused illustration is either BF (on 61 in the other editions) or the title-page's illustration of deer and faun. The illustrations here are excellent! The text is different from the text used in the other versions. Notice that Routledge had a whole series of one-syllable books. Other items in the series are listed facing the beginning T of C. The blue, black, and yellow cover puts one L-shaped section including two diverse scenes over another illustration. The result is both diffuse and confusing.

1863 Aesop's Fables: A New Version Chiefly from the Original Sources. Forty-Eighth Thousand. Thomas James. With more than one hundred illustrations designed by John Tenniel. Softbound. London: John Murray. £8 from Abbey Antiquarian Books, June, '98.

Here I think I have an early copy of Wolf's revision of Tenniel's work. Somewhere I have learned that Tenniel's original 1848 work published by Murray apparently got such a negative response that, before reissuing it (in 1851?), the publisher asked Joseph Wolf to create replacements for many of the engravings, and Tenniel himself revised some of the others. I do note that this book says nothing about Wolf, but the illustrations are sometimes radically different from those I find in my Murray editions of both 1848 and 1852. (Thus I wonder about the supposed 1851 dating of Wolf's revisions, since my 1852 edition seems faithful to Tenniel's original illustrations.) In fact, this 1863 edition is very close to that 1852 edition in size and format. Both present, apparently, as many illustrations as the 1848 original had presented. Because the two editions have exactly the same pagination but sometimes different illustrations, they make for wonderful comparative work. Some illustrations seem untouched ("The Fox and the Goat," "The Dog Invited to Supper," MSA), while others are changed quite drastically (FG, WC, FS). What Wolf loses, I believe, is the strong sense of dimensionality Tenniel achieved by the intensity of black: the best of Tenniel leaps off of the page, and Wolf's work does not leap! Consult my 1995 The Fables of Aesop from the QPBC for extensive comment on the movement from Tenniel to Wolf. Limp cloth covers. There is a pre-title-page illustration of Aesop teaching a small crowd, followed by James' introduction, a list of illustrations, the fables, and an AI.

1863 Esopo Volgariato per Uno da Siena: Testo di Lingua Accommodato ad Uso De' Giovanetti. Con Annotazioni da Bruto Fabricatore. Hardbound. Naples: Dalla Stamperia Del Vaglio. $17.50 from Marty Bourcier, Cheshire, CT, through eBay, July, '08.

This looks at first glimpse like a standard middle-sized-format collection, on (viii +) 128 pages, of some sixty-three fables in Italian with vocabulary footnotes. It is that, but below the last fable on 126 we read that the text was written by Francesco Orlandi in 1449. A former owner was perhaps trying to tip off later readers when he wrote on the front endpaper "Vedi Pagina #126." This is then a nice old Italian version of fables reprinted and commented on in the middle of the nineteenth century. There is an AI at the back of the book.

1863 Fables de la Fontaine. Illustrations par K. Girardet. Hardbound. Tours: Alfred Mame et Fils. $34.99 from Don Stine, Asbury Park, NJ, through eBay, July, '12.

Heretofore my earliest Girardet edition published by Mame has been in 1874. Bodemann #330 lists a first illustrated edition in 1857, which had been preceded by an unillustrated version in 1853. That 1857 illustrated edition seems identical with this copy. Later and apparently identical editions were published by Mame in 1860 and 1878. The illustrations are small but well done. This copy belonged to Stefan Sopkin and two other inscribers, one in 1924. As the seller noted, the book has a nice leather Morocco binding.

1863 Fables of Aesop and others. Translated into English, with instructive applications and 198 illustrations by Samuel Croxall. Boston: T.O.H.P. Burnham. Almost identical with the 1864 edition, this 1863 edition is brown, thinner, and in better condition. For $25 from Laurie, March, '88. Extra brown 1863 edition for $12 from Titles, Dec., '88. Extra copy for $50 from Laurie, Jan., '97.

The engravings in the copy from Titles are especially well done. Besides the alphabetical T of C at the beginning, there is an index of subjects at the end. It refers mostly to the virtues inculcated in the longish "applications." Since now in March of 1997, I have just done an exhaustive analysis of this book, let me mention here a few impressions of Croxall. Hobbs is perhaps even understated (84) when she says that "the morals, indigestible and sometimes irrelevant, occupy half the book." This edition contains 196 fables, which seems to be standard for Croxall. He has two versions of DLS, one (XLII) focussed on the owner and the ears and the other (CLXXVIII) on the fox and braying. Leaf follows Croxall's versions regularly. I seem to find James following him verbatim at least once ("The Bald Knight," Croxall XLVII). Croxall loves the phrase "could not forbear." His long applications read like sermons and seem often to look for a sermon-starting gem to work from; on these occasions, the fable itself seems left behind. Artzybasheff used Croxall and James as his text-sources. The 1865 Herrick edition uses Croxall texts with minor corrections and updates of language.

1863 Fables Original and Selected. G. Moir Bussey. Illustrated by numerous engravings by Orrin Smith, Breviere, etc. after designs by J.J. Grandville. With an introduction by G. Moir Bussey. Hardbound. NY: Illustrated Standard Edition: D. Appleton & Co. $7.99 from Gary Savoy, Holbrook, MA, through Ebay, June, '00.

This book reproduces, with a few differences, the edition I have listed under "1842?" from Willoughby and Company in London. The differences include the spine-and-cover, which has shifted from gold embossed on green with a human figure on the spine to brown cloth with gold lettering and a floral design on the spine. "Illustrated Standard Edition" continues to appear on the spine--but nowhere else! There is still a "Presented To . . . and From . . ." page just after the title-page. Book I's "insignia" page here comes before, not after, the AI. See my comments there and on the 1842 hand-colored edition.

1863 Fábulas y Cuentos Morales, Tomo I. D. Francisco Garces de Marcilla, Baron de Andilla. NA. Hardbound. Madrid: M.Rivadeneyra. $30 from an unknown source, August, '99.

This lovely little volume, bound in leather with Volume II from1864, remains a mystery to me. It contains a prolog and 180 pages given to ninety-four verse fables and fourteen verse cuentos. There are a number of illustrations, including two that have been at least partially hand-colored (22 and 168). Other illustrations occur on 48, 66, 115, 147, and 154. There is on 36 a fine illustration of the monkey phrenologist! From what I can gather, these are not redoings of Aesopic fables but rather fables with original subjects. The title-page includes florid titles, dedications, and permissions (?) that would take too much space to reproduce here.

1863 Indian Fables From the Sanscrit of the Hitopadesa.  Florence Iacomb.  Chromo-lithographed by  W.R. Tymms from original designs by Florence Iacomb.  Hardbound.  London:  Day & Son.  $352.94 from Rooke Books, Bath, England, Sept., '22.  . 

1863 Moral Fables and Parables. By Ingram Cobbin. Hardbound. Printed in London: William Tegg. £12 from Abbey Antiquarian, Cheltenham, England, June, '97.

In this tight little (3¼" x 4½") 16mo, we have a version of the original behind Peter Parley's Book of Fables (1836), which claims Cobbin as source. See my comments there. This book contains fifty-five fables, whose sub-titles indicate the vice or virtue with which the fable deals. I have compared the two books. The designs of the illustrations are the same. I would guess that the illustrations there were done in imitation of these illustrations or the parents of these illustrations. The texts and the sub-titles are different, even for fables of the same name. The fables, as I write there, are full of explicit lessons about what little children should do. Many of these stories show animals learning too late what they should have done. The principal lesson is overwhelming: obey your parents! A typical fable is thus "The Angry Monkey" (59). Affronted by other monkeys, he climbs up into the rafters and begins throwing bricks and timbers at the other monkeys. He is admonished to be careful or he will bring the building down. He pays no heed. Soon the roof falls and the monkey's brains are dashed out. The fables that I noted in my comments there appear here. These include: "The Cow and the Clover" (39); "The Rat and Her Young Ones" (44); "The Fox and the Spaniel" (52); "The Rival Snails" (92); "The Child and the Rainbow" (124); and "The Young Wolf and the Lamb" (137; in the other version it is rather "The Wolf and the Young Lamb"). In "The Boy and the Loaded Ass" (27), both return from a difficult trip to find the master ordering the boy to take the ass on his back and carry him to the stable! Now there is an object lesson! Each fable has an illustration at the beginning and a tailpiece. The first illustration is faintly colored. The tailpieces here seem regularly to be related to the fable. There is a T of C at the beginning. I am delighted to have found a copy of Cobbin's work!

1863 The Illustrated Book of Songs for Children. Edited by H.L.L., Author of "Hymns from the Land of Luther." Illustrator seems to be "B.S." Edinburgh: T. Nelson and Sons. $10 at the Book Den in Santa Barbara, Aug., '88.

This lovely old book was sold in Edinburgh and given as a gift in Gstaad in 1981. Pages 82-3 put FG to a melody, with a poor illustration. The other illustrations are better. "The Bee and the Dove" on 96-7 is the old fable of the ant and the dove.

1863? Aesops [sic] Fables. Martin Kronheim (NA). Large-format toy book. London/New York: Cassell's Shilling Toy Books: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin. Gift of Adam Engel, Sacramento, Nov., '00.

This is a large-format toy book in very poor condition. Every page is frayed and torn. Pencil scribblings are frequent. The binding has been crudely sewn. It reduplicates--with two losses--the "Aesop's Fables" section of "Old Friends and New Faces" (1870) by the same publisher. Thus it never prints on both sides of the page. It begins with a full-page text and full-page colored illustration of 2W. There follow four pages of quartets of fable texts and matching quartets of colored fable pictures. The parallel section of "Old Friends" includes five such quartets. The text-page for the first quartet, including BS, is missing. My favorites among the illustrations still include the long-nosed woman sniffing the empty cask, the blackamoor being scrubbed, and the menacing owner of the ass in the lion-skin. The last four texts are printed on the inside of the back cover. The back cover itself has advertisements for several different series of Cassell's children books, including this one, which is said to include twenty-one plates.

1864 Aesop's Fables Complete.  Rev. T. James, M.A.  Illustrations by Tenniel and Wolf (NA).  Hardbound.  Philadelphia:  J.B. Lippincott and Co.  $3 from Melissa Hobson-Lee, Orrick, MO, through eBay, July, '16.

1864 Aesop's Fables in French. With a Description of Fifty Animals Mentioned Therein and a French and English Dictionary of All the Words Contained in the Work. No editor named. NY: Henry Holt. $15 from Greg Williams, March, '94. Two extras sold for $3 erroneously as a two volume work by Book Forum, Denver, March, '89.

Wonderful treasures! The advertisement following the title page claims that Aesop is the usual first book for learning French. LaFontaine is not mentioned; the French of the fables is taken from the Latin of Abbé Paul. Fifty descriptions, one hundred fables (61-127), and a long dictionary (129-237). My good copy has some gnawing or wear on the upper left hand corner of the front cover and some interior pencil marks. It has no advertising on the inside of the front cover. The first extra has pencilling on the title page, a page of advertising before the title page, and an inscription (1882) on the inside front cover. The second extra has a watermarked cover and lacks the page of advertising before the title page. The original price was $.65. I will keep all three in the collection.

1864 Fables de La Fontaine. M. Félix LeMaistre. Édition illustrée de gravures sur bois d'après les dessins de Staal. Hardbound. Paris: Garnier Frères, Libraires. $35 from Phoenix Books, Lambertville, NJ, through Ebay, June, '00.

Full text of the fables. I find that I have another edition by the same publisher, editor, and artist with more illustrations. See my comments on it under "1910?" There I had picked out six images as not in the Grandville tradition. Curiously, those six turn out--with the addition of I 16--to be the very images included here. Those that are here include: a frontispiece portrait of La Fontaine; "La Mort et le Boucheron" (I 16); LM (II 11); "L'Ane et le petit Chien" (IV 5); Les Médecins" (V 12); MM (VII 10); "Le Savetier et le Financier" (VIII 2); and "Le Vieillard et les trois jeunes Hommes" (XI 8). The best of these for me are VI 5 and VIII 2. There is an AI at the back.

1864 Fables in Verse. Hardbound. Boston: Crosby and Nichols/NY: Oliver S. Felt. $17.05 from Cathy Thoenen, Mexico, MO, through Ebay, June, '00.

This is a small volume about 5" x 6" with 32 fables on 124 pages. Actually, the numbering of fables in the middle is confused, though no pages are skipped. The order of fables goes through this progression: XIV, XVIII, XIX, XV, XVI, XVII, XX. The frontispiece is a circular illustration of WL inside an ornate frame. The title-page illustration is of three children sitting on the ground. The other illustrations are simple and of several sorts. There are some large full-page illustrations of a given animal involved in a fable (e.g., the peacock on 15). There are other illustrations, sometimes smaller, of fable scenes. The larger illustrations have blank but numbered reverse pages. There are finally tailpieces, many of which seem not to be relevant to the fable at hand (e.g. 32 36, 40). Most fables are followed by a two-line moral. The illustration for "The Ass and the Lion" (31) shows a lion, ass, and rooster; I think we have the illustration from one fable here used for another! I have the impression that I have seen these fable illustrations before. I like the closing lines of FS:  "'No malice,' says the Crane, 'adieu!/Remember I was taught by you'" (40).  The clay pot does all the speaking to the brass pot, asking him to keep his distance (61). "The Mountain in Labor" (72) wins a brevity prize, since it is only four lines long. The moral in GA chides the grasshopper for idleness and the "emmet" for niggardliness (89). Heavily foxed. Inscribed in 1866.

1864 Fables of Aesop and others. Translated into English, with instructive applications and 198 illustrations by Samuel Croxall. Boston: T.O.H.P. Burnham. Almost identical with the 1863 edition, this 1864 edition is blue, thicker, and in poorer condition. $10 from Eucharistic Missionaries, New Orleans, June '87.

Now this is a real find! I thought I had a Croxall. The engravings (woodcuts?) are well done. A real gold mine! Besides the alphabetical T of C at the beginning, there is an index of subjects at the end. It refers mostly to the virtues inculcated in the longish "applications."

1864 Fábulas y Cuentos Morales, Tomo II. D. Francisco Garces de Marcilla, Baron de Andilla. NA. Hardbound. Madrid: C. Moliner y Compania. $30 from an unknown source, August, '99.

This lovely little volume, bound in leather with Volume I from1863, remains a mystery to me. It contains a prolog and 182 pages given to one hundred-and-eighteen verse fables and seventeen verse cuentos. There are a number of illustrations, including several that have been at least partially hand-colored (26, 53, 100, 108, and 142). Other illustrations occur on 77 and 155. There is on 123 a fine illustration of theory and practice. From what I can gather, these are not redoings of Aesopic fables but rather fables with original subjects. The title-page includes florid titles, dedications, and permissions (?) that would take too much space to reproduce here. Notice that the publisher has changed from Volume I.

1864 Favole d'Esopo Volgarizzate per uno da Siena Cavate dal Codice Laurenziano Inedito e Riscontrate con Tutti I Codici Fiorentini e col Senese. Paperbound. Florence: Felice le Monnier. In trade with Clare Leeper, who paid $10 for it, July, '96.

This text has 63 numbered Italian fables with two inedited fables at the end. There are extensive footnotes. Each fable closes with a Latin couplet. A cursory check suggests that there are no surprises in the subjects of the fables here. They seem to come straight from the tradition of Walter of England. The first six titles match the first six of his sixty fables in Aaron Wright's 1997 text. For help on Italian fable versions, check The Isopo Laurenziano (1899) by Murray Peabody Brush.

1864 Lafontaine's Fabeln.  In neuer Auswahl und Bearbeitung von Friedrich Hoffmann.  Zweite Auflage.  Hardbound.  Stuttgart: Verlag von Rudolph Chelius.  $250 from Paul S,, Kelton, PA, through Ebay, Feb., '18.

1864 Merry's Museum and Woodworth's Cabinet, Vol. 48, No. 5, Nov., 1864.  Edited by Robert Merry Hiram Hatchet, Uncle William, and Aunt Sue.  Paperbound.  NY: J. N. Stearns, Publisher.  $4 from Bluestem Books, Lincoln, NE, Dec., '14.  

1864 Picture Fables.  F. Hey, Henry W. Dulcken.  Illustrated by Otto Speckter.  Tenth thousand.  Hardbound.  London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge.  £18 from June Clinton, May, '97.

1864 Select Fables of La Fontaine With English Notes. Carefully Adapted For the Use of Schools and the Young by Ferdinand Gasc. New Edition. Hardbound. London: Foreign Classics: Whittaker and Co./Bell and Daldy. $9 from Wordplay, St. John's, Newfoundland, Feb., '03.

This schoolbook offers one-hundred-and-twenty fables with extensive English notes. There are four pages of advertisements at either end of the book. Formerly the property of the Department of Romance Languages at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. This book is in poor condition. The first few pages are loose, and the binding is deteriorating.

1864 The Child's Own Picture and Verse Book. Selected and arranged, from the best authorities, by a "Grandfather." Illustrated with one hundred engravings. NY: James Miller. $40 at Bibelots & Books, Seattle, July, '93.

A wonderful little squarish book in very good condition. Ninety-seven verse fables, each in a standard format: a text, ten to fifteen lines long, on the left page is echoed in a framed illustration on the right page. The unchanging frame includes a circular FS scene above and a DLS scene below. It is curious that while so many of the stories are fables, the book never mentions them as such. One of the few non-fables is on 36. Some of the fables are presented differently here. The bear only scratches the hermit, who admonishes him about future behavior (22); the cat claims on 44 that she will eat the bat as a bird; the fly in the telescope is perceived to be a planet (46); not priests but gypsies beat the ass even after his death (84); and the animal who gets help to remain unperceived by the hunters is here not a fox but a stag (172). There are some problems. For example, there is at times a strange mixture of direct and indirect speech, e.g., on 156. Further, could the milkmaid with her fancy hat on 191 have balanced a pail on her head? A good sample version is "The Rocket and the Star" on 130. Another is "The Chameleon" (116). There are many "taunt and response" conversations. Many trees and plants speak. The illustrations are delightful. There is one for each fable except the first. Add the frontispiece, the title page, and the front cover (with its lovely embossed "The Shepherd and the Dog") and we seem to fall one short of the hundred engravings promised by the title-page. Good examples of fine illustrations are "The Lion Worn with Age" (63), "The Lynx and the Mole" (79), and "The Ass and the Farmer" (171). The foxes inside the vignette-pictures are less successful (e.g., 163 and 165). Most of the lions here are not successfully rendered (103, 146). There are six title-page advertisements for books in the very last pages.

1864/2010 Reynard the Fox In South Africa Or Hottentot Fables and Tales. W.H.I. Bleek. Hardbound. London/La Vergne, TN: Trübner and Company/Kessinger Publishing. AUD$41.99 from thenile.com.au through eBay, July, '10.

This is a "reprint upon demand" book from Kessinger, perhaps the only such book I have hardbound. On some 94 pages there are thirty-five numbered fables divided according to the following categories: jackal fables; tortoise fables; baboon fables; lion fables; various fables; and sun and moon fables. The 21-page preface makes a fascinating point. The Hottentot culture of South Africa produces genuine fables, perhaps alone among African peoples. This insight is couched in racial judgments we would find highly questionable today. Consider this statement: "The fact of such a literary capacity existing among a nation whose mental qualifications it has been usual to estimate at the lowest standard, is of the greatest importance" (xii). Were these fables the real offspring of the desert, Bleek asks, or were they "purloined from the superior white race" (xiii)? Fable #5 and Fable #6 both follow a standard old fable, but now the situation is that a man has removed a stone pinning down a snake. The snake wants to bite the man. Asked to judge in the case, the jackal plays stupid: "I won't believe this situation you were in until I see it with my own two eyes." When the original situation is recreated, the jackal urges the man to go free. #8 is the famous story of the fox playing dead to get into the fisherman's wagon. #10 has jackal and hyena in the place, respectively, of the fox and the wolf in the fable that turns on the suffering king lion's needing a warm wolf's skin to heal him. #11 has the basic plot of the story about sacrificing a child to a threatener's threats; he will soon ask for another. Many of the stories turn on outwitting an opponent. A few strike me as typical "Pourquoi?" stories rather than Aesopic fables. There seem also to be one or two animal metamorphosis stories. There are finally two sections of legends and household tales, respectively. Page 34 is hastily copied and therefore illegible.

1865 Aesopi Fabulae Latine Redditae. Hardbound. Etonae (Eton)/Londini (London): E.P. Williams/Simpkin, Marshall, et Soc. $15 from Madeleine Argouarch, Mooers, NY, through eBay, Dec., 12.

This is a straightforward, tight, good looking book of eighty pages, 4" x 7", presenting 144 Latin fables. It is inscribed by W. Thackwray Shaw in 1866. There is also a notation "Don Shaw 12.02" on the obverse of the title-page. A little web research has brought up some unsuspected aspects to this book. One bibliographical service in Australia finds a version in Latin and Greek by E.P. Williams in Eton in 1867. That book has the same title as the first two words of the title here. Its page notation seems to indicate that it has two sections, one of 101 pages and one of 81 pages. Could that book simply combine a Greek section of 101 pages with this Latin section? Google Books finds a version of Aesopi Fabulae by Williams in 1865 but has it containing 101 pages. That sounds like the possible Greek section of the Australian reference. WorldCat has an M. Pote and E. Williams publishing Aesopi fabulae Graeco-Latinae in 1807 and again, without reference to Pote, in 1859. It looks as though the family of this little book got around! 

1865 Fables of Aesop and Others with Instructive Applications. By Samuel Croxall and other moralists. Illustrated by One Hundred and Thirty Engravings. NY: James Miller. $27 from Ralph Casperson, Niles, MI, May, '95.

The title is common for Croxall editions. The illustrations and publisher are new to me. 248 fables in a lovely 7" by 4.5" book with gold-embossed brown cover and spine. AI at front. Book advertisements at the front and back. A charming frontispiece includes two humans at the center and a fox with a mirror at the bottom. The illustrations are framed rectangles generally including a corner-cropped image or sometimes an oval. The illustrator has trouble with lions' faces (e.g., 219). New to me is #222, "The Toad and the Ephemeron." Might some of the applications be shorter than Croxall's? Some bookseller made notes on the engraver on a separate sheet placed into the book.

1865 The Fables of Aesop with a Life of the Author. Illustrated with One Hundred and Eleven Engravings from Original Designs by Herrick. First edition. NY: Hurd and Houghton. (Boston: E.P. Dutton and Company.) $60 from Nancy Stewart, Beaverton, March, '96.

At last I have a first edition of Herrick! And it is in excellent condition! The plates seem identical with those in my three 1865/95? copies. The illustrations come off here as much livelier and more dramatic. Take as examples "The Eagle and the Fox" (61), "The Birds, the Beasts, and the Bat" (112), and "The Young Man and His Cat" (218). Still, I find that Herrick does not rank for me as one of the top Aesopic illustrators. There is one illustration per story (there are 110 fables in all) and a frontispiece. The texts, I have learned in reviewing this during 1996, are Croxall's, though apparently only a selection of his work. Enjoy "The Hunted Beaver" (86) with its tactful and mysterious reference to "a certain part" of the beaver. There is a T of C at the beginning. The blue cover has a beautiful gold-embossed fox-head at its center.

1865 The Fables of Aesop with a Life of the Author. Illustrated with One Hundred and Eleven Engravings from Original Designs by Herrick. First edition. NY: Hurd and Houghton. (Boston: E.P. Dutton and Company.) In trade in July, '96, from Clare Leeper, who paid $75 to Pauline Hull, Adah, PA, in May, '89.

See my comments under the adjacent listing of the blue-covered edition found in Beaverton. This edition has red covers with five animals embossed on the front cover and WL on the spine. The plates seem exactly the same, but the margins are smaller. The one typographic difference comes on the reverse of the title-page and has to do with particulars about Riverside Press. I had thought that the two books were identical until I got them onto the shelf together.

1865/68 The Fables of Aesop with a Life of the Author. Illustrated with One Hundred and Eleven Engravings from Original Designs by Herrick. Hardbound. NY: Hurd and Houghton. $70 from The Antiquarian Archive, Los Altos, CA, March, '97.

In many ways, this book is identical with the 1865 first edition. See my notes there. The differences I can see are that E.P. Dutton in Boston is not mentioned here. This edition is covered in bright green cloth with nice gilt embossing of the cover (FK) and spine (FS). The original edition is Bodemann #334.1. I found this book on a lovely bike ride on a sunny California afternoon.

1865? Little Fables for Little Folks. Pamphlet. New Series Toy Books. Printed in London. London: The Religious Tract Society. £40 from Roe and Moore, London, June, '02.

This is an eighteen-page large format toy book printed by Kronheim & Company in London. Actually, six of the pages are chromolithograph inserts printed on only one side. Even the text-pages are printed on only one side. The verse fables here include LM, "The Birds in Council," DM, DLS, "The Wolf and the Kid," and "The Bear and the Bees." The lion's facial expression in the very first illustration is worth careful study as he looks out through his ropes at the observer. Uncle Fred interacts with children listeners throughout the pamphlet.

1865? The Robinson Crusoe Picture Book. Containing: Robinson Crusoe, How Cock Sparrow Kept His Christmas, Queer Characters, Aesop's Fables. Illustrations printed in colours by [Martin] Kronheim. London/New York: George Routledge and Sons. $5.99 from Edith Reynolds of Taxter, Waterbury, CT, July, '99, through Ebay.

See my comments on my 1870 Old Friends and New Faces, which may well have been a cheaper knock-off of this earlier (?) book. The order of the sections has changed, for there QC, AF, and "Cock Sparrow" (not the longer title here) followed the title-story. This book is appreciably thinner--a result perhaps of finer paper? This edition follows the same pattern of facing texts and interleaved blank pages, and the Aesop illustrations are the same. The Kronheim illustrations are intact here and not scribbled upon. The frontispiece and the pages preceding it are loose. See my comments there. What a bargain! This front cover is also embossed in gold, but its picture is of Robinson Crusoe, with Friday just behind him. There is a comprehensive list of illustrations just after the title-page.

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1866 A Choice of Emblemes. Edited by Henry Green. Hardbound. Printed in Manchester, England. London: Lovell Reeve & Co.; Chester: Minshull & Hughes; Nantwich: E.H. Griffiths. $100 from James P. Harrington, San Francisco, Nov., '02.

First published in Leyden in 1586 by Geffrey Whitney. This is the reissue in London in 1866, edited by H. Green. See my 1967 reprint of this reissue. This is a major inventory of emblems, including some 247 emblems and 92 dedications. There are significant essays and notes on the emblems after the inventory Do not overlook the T of C on ix. The first collection of emblems was Andreas Alciati's Emblemata published in Augsburg in 1531. Apparently, some three hundred emblem books were published between 1531 and 1700. On lxxxv one finds Whitney's helpful index of motives, Latin and English. His work is an anthology culled from a number of emblem books. For good examples of both text and image see "The Goat and the Wolf Whelp" (49) and "Anellus' Wife" (80). I have been amazed at how many fable motifs and fables show up in this work. In all, I find some fifty-three of these emblems using fables and fable-motifs. See my handwritten notes on them at the back of the 1967 reproduction. Typical non-fables are on 172, where a candle, book, and hour-glass help to warn us to use the time, and on 181, which shows the traits of "occasio," which I take to indicate especially opportunity. Horace, Ovid, and Livy seem to be the ancient authors most frequently referred to. The second part (beginning on 105) seems to offer famous Romans as subjects up to 117. After working my way, somewhat laboriously, through the 1967 reproduction, I was pleasantly surprised to find this volume waiting for me at a San Mateo bookfair.

1866 Aesop's Fables Complete.  Rev. T. James, M.A.  NA (Tenniel and Wolf).  Hardbound.  Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Co.  $10 from Wanda Ross, Cupertino CA, through eBay, Sept., '14.  

1866 Beginning French: Exercises in Pronouncing, Spelling and Translating with a Vocabulary of Familiar Words and A Collection of Easy Phrases and Dialogues in French and English. L. Pylodet. New edition, revised and enlarged. Hardbound. NY: Henry Holt and Company. $10 from Clare Leeper, July, '96.

This rather standard book of French exercises contains on 150-53 two interlinear fables from La Fontaine: GA and FC. The cover announces the book as "Beginning French: Ahn's and Beleze's Systems." It has undergone some wear in its 145 years.

1866 Fables in the French Language for the Use of Beginners in the Study.  François Ledru.  Hardbound.  NY: A.S. Barnes & Co.  $30 from Mdpinc Books, Quincy, MA, through abe, June, '15.  

1866 Gay's Fables. With memoir, introduction, and annotations by Octavius Freire Owen. Illustrated by William Harvey. London: Frederick Warne and Co. $20 at Bookhouse, Alexandria, Oct., '91.

A curious little book with its cover falling off. Gay's fables are heavily satirical; Juvenal is quoted heavily in the notes. For other comments on the fables themselves, see my 1727/38/1967 edition. The most interesting parts of this little volume are the notes and endpieces. The notes show decided wit (e.g., 185-6). By contrast with the larger illustrations, which perhaps resemble Tenniel most but are inferior in quality, the endpieces are engaging (though unfortunately small) presentations of Aesop's fables--perhaps borrowed from Harvey's own work illustrating Northcote? Some representative illustrations and fables here include: "The Monkey Who'd Seen the World" (I 14, also embossed on book's cover), "The Old Woman and the Cats" (I 23), and "The Baboon and the Poultry" (II 3). Some bookdealer has written in that "Dalziell" did the woodcuts and that there are 129 vignettes in all.

1866 Il volgarizzamento delle favole di Galfredo dette di Esopo: testo di lingua, Vol. 1. Gaetano Ghivizzani. Paperbound. Bologna: Scelta di Curiosità Litterarie Inedite o Rare dal Secolo XIII al XVII, Dispensa LXXV: Gaetano Romagnoli. €20 from Müller und Gräff, Stuttgart, August, '09.

Here is a strange, delicate, unlikely, wonderful find. How likely is it that I find in a Stuttgart bookshop one of 202 copies of an obscure 1866 Bologna publication on an Italian popularization of medieval fables? This first volume of two lacks its outer cover, but each of its twelve signatures is intact. The collection in which it appears is itself curious: "Scelta di Curiosità Litterarie Inedite o Rare dal Secolo XIII al XVII, Dispensa LXXV." (Volume II is Dispensa LXXVI). Some of this volume's pages are uncut. This first volume is an historical study of the origins and development of Italian fable. There is a summary or overview, though without page numbers, starting on IX. (Its 217 pages are numbered with Roman numerals.) This volume has 57 chapters, moving from the history of fable to consideration particularly, I gather, of the sources of Italian popularizations of Aesop. Final sections cover the manuscripts and books of Italian popularizations of Aesop and tables showing the correspondence of the fables of Galfredo (sometimes "Gauffredo") with the fables of other collations. The last section seems to be a dictionary of unusual vocabulary -- or unusually used vocabulary -- found in Galfredo's texts. The big question for me, with no Italian, is whether Galfredo (Geoffrey?) is Walter of England or an Italian derivative of Walter. I tend to the latter opinion: this book is about an Italian prose version of the Anonymous Neveleti (Walter of England), whose texts are given in the second volume. This volume is not numbered, as the second volume is (#105 of 202 copies printed). I notice on Italian Wikipedia that there are three different studies in the 1860's, including this one, on the popularization (volgarizzamento) of Aesopic fable. The subject was apparently in the air.

1866 Il volgarizzamento delle favole di Galfredo dette di Esopo: testo di lingua, Vol. 2. Gaetano Ghivizzani. #105 of 202. Paperbound. Bologna: Scelta di Curiosità Litterarie Inedite o Rare dal Secolo XIII al XVII, Dispensa LXXVI: Gaetano Romagnoli. €20 from Müller und Gräff, Stuttgart, August, '09.

Here is the second volume of a set whose unusual character I have suggested in my comments on Volume 1. This book still has a covering on its spine (broken between 112 and 113), and it reads "Testo Inedito" and "Parte II." Its pagination is Arabic as opposed to the Roman pagination of Volume 1. This volume offers a transcription of Galfredo's 62 fables with copious notes (1-155). An appendix adds Fables 63 through 97, taken from other manuscripts. A helpful T of C (283-5) clarifies that these fables are taken, respectively, from eight other sources listed there. Corrections and two indices close out the volume. The cover does not indicate the subject of this particular volume: "Scelta di Curiosità Litterarie Inedite o Rare dal Secolo XIII al XVII, Dispensa LXXVI." Here is one last curiosity: even though there is a page of Errata at the very end of this volume, there are two inserted loose slightly-too-large pages whose title starts "Errata Corrige" as well as two extra copies, likewise cut too large, of pages 97-98 and 111-12. Are the second page's errata a new set found after the first set was printed and already made a part of the book?

1866 Latin Reader: First Part. Jacobs and Döring. Adapted to Andrews and Stoddard's Latin Grammar and to Andrews First Latin Book. Sixty-fifth edition. Boston: Crocker and Brewster. See 1849/66.

1866 Les Miettes d'Ésope: Fables.  Auguste Roussel.  Gavarni.  Paperbound.  Paris: Furne, Jouvet et Cie.  €85 from Librairie Traits et Caractères, Sens, France, March, ‘21.  

1866 The Fables of Aesop. Translated into English by Samuel Croxall, D.D. With new applications, morals, etc. by the Rev. Geo. Fyler Townsend. With one hundred and ten original illustrations. London: Frederick Warne and Co. $57 from June Clinton, Feb., '94.

One of two very curious books sent together; compare it with The Fables of Aesop from Warne for whose printing date I have guessed the same year. That edition adds fifty fables but no illustrations to the 110 fables here; it also mentions l'Estrange with Croxall and L. Valentine with Townsend. This edition in a nice red-and-gilt binding is slightly mottled but in good condition otherwise. The edition does indeed have the same narrative texts as my 1863 Croxall but different applications. I tried to check next whether the applications and morals here match those in Townsend's other work. A quick check reveals that there are no applications in Townsend's editions of 300 and 350 fables. One moral I have found is close to the one found in those editions: where the "350" edition has "Don't make much ado about nothing," this edition has "Do not make much ado about nothing." I hope someday to be able to place this edition in Townsend's development: did he work first on morals and applications to Croxall's fables and then move into translating fables for himself? Unfortunately, neither Hobbs nor Quinnam seems to mention Townsend.

1866? Gay's Fables. With Memoir, Introduction, and Annotations by Octavius Freire Owen. Illustrated by William Harvey. Hardbound. London: Frederick Warne and Co. $20 from Clare Leeper, July, '96.

This is a larger--and presumably more original version--of a book by the same publisher, though through a different printer. I will guess at the same date that that other book announces on its title-page. In fact, this book uses the same plates but gives much bigger margins around them. Also, the runs on the illustrations are stronger. The nice embossed "Monkey Who Had Seen the World" on the cover is not here. Lamentably, this book is in as poor condition as that other book. Scotch tape is holding the spine together. Let me repeat some of my comments made on that other version. Gay's fables are heavily satirical; Juvenal is quoted heavily in the notes. For other comments on the fables themselves, see my 1727/38/1967 edition. The most interesting parts of this volume are the notes and endpieces. The notes show decided wit (e.g., 185-6). By contrast with the larger illustrations, which perhaps resemble Tenniel most but are inferior in quality, the endpieces are engaging (though unfortunately small) presentations of Aesop's fables--perhaps borrowed from Harvey's own work illustrating Northcote? Some representative illustrations and fables here include: "The Monkey Who'd Seen the World" (I 14), "The Old Woman and the Cats" (I 23), and "The Baboon and the Poultry" (II 3).

1866? The Fables of Aesop. Translated into English by Samuel Croxall, D.D. and Sir Roger L'Estrange. With applications, morals, etc. by the Rev. G. F. Townsend and L. Valentine. With 110 original illustrations. London: Frederick Warne and Co. Gift of June Clinton, Feb., '94.

One of two very curious books sent together; compare it with The Fables of Aesop from Warne in 1866. This edition adds fifty fables but no illustrations to the 110 fables there; it also mentions l'Estrange with Croxall and L. Valentine with Townsend. This edition in a bright blue cover with "The Prize Library" on its front has a badly damaged binding. See my notes on the other edition for the basic 110 texts. Where do l'Estrange and Valentine fit in? Are the extra fables perhaps taken from l'Estrange and their morals and applications done by Valentine? I did a brief check on the texts here and in the 1992 Knopf/Everyman edition that uses l'Estrange's text. The two sample fables I chose, "Mercury and the Carpenter" and "The Crow and the Mussel," show very close similarities to each other in the narrative text but none in the moral or application/reflection. It could be that either edition has "adapted" l'Estrange. Here is some work to pursue when I get a good l'Estrange edition!

1867 Aesop's Fables Illustrated. Illustrations from John Tenniel, not acknowledged. Hardbound. NY: The People's Edition: Fowler and Wells. $11.50 from Rei Kacinsckas, Baltimore, through eBay, July, '05.

Here is a pleasant little surprise. Earlier, I had worked my way back through editions of 1873, 1870, and 1868. The seller had told me that the last of these was a first edition. Now here is the identical book published not by "Samuel R. Wells" but by "Fowler and Wells, Publishers" at the same address a year earlier. The book is identical with that of 1868, down to the broken typeface on the page numbers for the last two units in the beginning AI. The beginning also has a list of the fifty-five illustrations. It seems to me that what we have here are copies of Tenniel's (not Wolfe's) work. They are now often signed by the engraver (e.g., Felter, Howland, or Orr). As in the other copies, the advertisements at the back of the book are strong on phrenology. The book is in only fair condition.

1867 Fables de Krilov.  Traduites en vers Français par Charles Parfait.  Hardbound.  Paris:  Henri Plon.  £28 from Barma's Books, Sheffield, UK, Oct., '17.

1867 Fables de Krilov.  Traduites en vers Français par Charles Parfait.  Paperbound.  Paris: Henri Plon.  €10 from Librairie de l'Avenue, Saint-Ouen, August, '17.

1867 Fables de La Fontaine, Tome I. Jean de La Fontaine. Avec les Dessins de Gustave Doré. Hardbound. First edition. Paris: Hachette. $300 per volume from Edward Pollack, Boston, Sept., '98.

At last a genuine first edition of Doré. It was so good of Edward to let me know about it! This is, like its companion Volume II, a huge and heavy book. A wonderful showpiece for the eighty-four full-page wood engravings; the 248 head and tail pieces come out unusually distinctly here too. The more I know Doré, the more I enjoy him, and this book presents his work so well! Consult Justin Schiller's Realms of Childhood, 149. This is apparently a first edition that came out in 1867, 2 volumes, printed in red and black inks, with red borders and gilt all around. But I believe that this is not the deluxe edition that Schiller speaks of there, for he speaks in terms of its "large woodcuts all printed directly as proofs on India Paper (mounted)." There is no mounting here. The covers are red with gold inlay; notice how various animals play in the broad strokes of the letters of La Fontaine's name. The same work was also issued in 58 weekly fascicles on lower quality paper. The full-page wood engravings, like GA (6), come off the page vibrant! A wistful head piece like that for "L'Hirondelle et les petits Oiseaux" (20) is exquisite. Some slight foxing. The interplay between Doré's two illustrations for a single piece is often fascinating, as with those for OR (52): the powerful man on his horse charges past a fallen tree in the headpiece; in the large wood engraving, the tree is up--and majestic!--while the horse and rider are fallen. In the head piece for "Le Loup plaidant contre le Renard par-devant le Singe" a monkey judge listens to two human beings (62), This is a book to read standing up! Some slight foxing. So many of the full-page illustrations are famous and have appeared on covers of translations, and so reading this book is like meeting celebrities in person! A new pair of favorites are the two illustrations for "L'Avare qui a perdu son Trésor" (198). Another is "Les Médécins" (236). At the back are alphabetical tables of the large gravures and of the fables of this first volume. The book belonged previously to Caroline Tappan.

1867 Fables de La Fontaine, Tome II. Jean de La Fontaine. Avec les Dessins de Gustave Doré. Hardbound. First edition. Paris: Hachette. $300 per volume from Edward Pollack, Boston, Sept., '98.

See my comments on Volume I. There seems to be rather heavy foxing at the very beginning of this book. Again, the full-page wood engravings, like MM (32), come off the page vibrant! A newly discovered head piece is that for "Les Femmes et le Secret" (76), in which sellers at a market are lined up in the background as ready recipients of the whispered secret from the foreground. A new favorite full-page illustration is "L'Ours et l'Amateur des Jardins" (88). I think I can see the fly very distinctly! The match of the two illustrations for "Les deux Pigeons" (148) is very nice, since the stance of the woman copies that of the pigeon that we see on the facing page. The head piece of "Les deux Chevres" (298) gives a rarely pictured impression of the unequal outcome as one goat pushes the other off the narrow bridge. In "L'Ecrivisse et sa Fille" (317), mother and daughter are equally stooped over. The full-page illustration of "L'Amour et la Folie" (329) has become detached. Doré is at his best with night-scenes as in "Le Renard et les Poulets d'Inde" (342) and "Le Renard anglois" (354). At the back of the volume are again alphabetical tables of the large gravures and of the fables of this second volume. The book belonged previously to Caroline Tappan.

1867 Fables in Verse. Hardbound. Boston: Crosby and Ainsworth/NY: Oliver S. Felt. $20 from Brattle Book Shop, Boston, Oct., '03.

This small volume reproduces a small 1864 volume of the same title by Crosby and Nichols in Boston and, as then, by Oliver S. Felt in New York. There is the same confused order of fables from XIV through XX. The printing of the illustrations is sometimes superior here, and the foxing slightly less. See my extensive comments there.

1867 The Fables of Aesop. Text of Croxall NA. With Illustrations by Henry L. Stephens, Lithographed by Julius Bien. Hardbound. NY: Edward H. Weed. $49.50 from Robert S. Brooks, Evanston, IL, Jan., '04.

This book has been a complete surprise. It is rare for me to find a fable book of which I had never heard. Here is one, found in a routine check of ABE listings. This is a large-formatted book, 10¼" x 12¼". Of its one hundred and ten fables, fifty-six are illustrated. The texts seem to come from Croxall, without acknowledgement. The illustrations are ambitious, and each receives its own page. Am I wrong, or do some, like "The Eagle and the Fox" (17), suffer from perspective problems? Among the better illustrations may be "The Lion and the Four Bulls" (11); "The Lion and the Other Beasts" (46); WC (65); and "The Cat and the Mice" (72). Is the wolf that preaches to the poor fox in the well in fact a preacher (18)? The wolf in sheep's clothing is seducing a female sheep as the shepherd comes upon him (30). This is one of the few versions to picture "The Hunted Beaver" (38). For laughs, enjoy "The Fatal Marriage" (48). Animals are dressed in human garb. The illustrations in fact sometimes remind me of Bennett's work. Not in Bodemann. There is an AI at the beginning.

1867 Three Hundred Aesop's Fables. Literally Translated from the Greek by the Rev. Geo. Fyler Townsend, M.A. With One Hundred and Fourteen Illustrations Designed by Harrison Weir and Engraved by J. Greenaway. First edition thus? Hardbound. London: George Routledge and Sons. £35 from Sterling Books, Somerset, England by mail, August, '00.

I am delighted with this book, especially because it is now my oldest Weir publication. I am also delighted because it may show Weir's work to best advantage, since the illustrations are done on good paper and are in good condition. Weir so often appears in cheap editions whose illustrations are indistinct! Among the most memorable illustrations here are LM (1), WL (3), WC (5), TH (9), "The Seagull and the Kite" (108), and "The Ass and His Driver" (199). There is a set of illustrations that I find sketchier and almost ethereal. They would include "The Labourer and the Snake" (33) and "The Blind Man and the Whelp" (167). Bodemann puts in 1865 the first printing of a book with this title but with only fifty illustrations. That book's title-page does not mention Greenaway. Her #335.2 speaks of a book from about 1890 as a "Nachdruck der im Illustrationsbestand erweiterten zweiten Ausgabe London 1867." This that "zweite Ausgabe." The spine reads "The Fables of Aesop" without mention of "Three Hundred." The title-page after identifying London and Routledge and before giving the year adds: "The Broadway, Ludgate. New York: 416, Broome Street."

1867/71 Three Hundred Aesop's Fables.  Literally Translated from the Greek by the Rev. Geo. Fyler Townsend, M.A..  With One Hundred and Fourteen Illustrations Designed by Harrison Weir and Engraved by J. Greenaway.  Hardbound.  London: George Routledge and Sons.  $5 from N. Fagin Books, through eBay, Oct., '13.

1867/74 Aesop's Fables: A New Version Chiefly from the Original Sources. By Thomas James. With more than one hundred illustrations designed by Tenniel and Wolf. Sixty-eighth thousand. London: John Murray. $47.50 through June Clinton, February, '94.

This little book represents my first copy of Wolf's revision of Tenniel's work. Tenniel's original 1848 work published by Murray apparently got such a negative response that, before reissuing it in 1851, the publisher asked Joseph Wolf to create replacements for many of the engravings, and Tenniel himself revised some of the others. Apparently Strahan published a Tenniel/Wolf edition in 1867, and this present, smaller-format book may be a later printing of that. In any case, it still contains the 203 fables of the 1848 edition, but their order is different. My favorite private collector's 1868 Murray printing (F-0110) represents the sixty-third thousand. This present book, the sixty-eighth thousand, features a list of illustrations before the title page and an AI at the back. If one compares this book with the 1848 Murray first edition, some illustrations seem untouched ("The Fox and the Goat," "The Dog Invited to Supper," MSA), while others are changed quite drastically (FG, WC, FS). What Wolf loses, I believe, is the strong sense of dimensionality Tenniel achieved by the intensity of black: the best of Tenniel leaps off of the page, and Wolf's work does not leap! Consult my 1995 The Fables of Aesop from the QPBC for extensive comment on the movement from Tenniel to Wolf.

1867/74 Aesop's Fables: A New Version Chiefly from the Original Sources. By Thomas James. With more than one hundred illustrations designed by Tenniel and Wolf. Sixty-eighth Thousand. Hardbound. London: John Murray. $47 from Booksnmaps.com through eBay, May, '08.

Here is another copy of the 1874 printing of a book first published in 1867. This version has one external and one internal difference from that book, which came to me from June Clinton. The price of the two copies is amazingly close, since this book cost half a dollar less than that. The external difference here lies in the binding: marbled boards and leather with a golden title and golden scrollwork on the spine. The Clinton copy is covered in blue cloth, but with a beautiful golden illustration with title and author embedded in the front cover. Internally, the Clinton copy surprisingly presents a paper cover and a list of illustrations before the title-page. This copy has a more traditional arrangement of these elements. I will repeat my comments made on the Clinton copy. This little book represents my first copy of Wolf's revision of Tenniel's work. Tenniel's original 1848 work published by Murray apparently got such a negative response that, before reissuing it in 1851, the publisher asked Joseph Wolf to create replacements for many of the engravings, and Tenniel himself revised some of the others. Apparently Strahan published a Tenniel/Wolf edition in 1867, and this present, smaller-format book may be a later printing of that. In any case, it still contains the 203 fables of the 1848 edition, but their order is different. My favorite private collector's 1868 Murray printing (F-0110) represents the sixty-third thousand. If one compares this book with the 1848 Murray first edition, some illustrations seem untouched ("The Fox and the Goat," "The Dog Invited to Supper," MSA), while others are changed quite drastically (FG, WC, FS). What Wolf loses, I believe, is the strong sense of dimensionality Tenniel achieved by the intensity of black: the best of Tenniel leaps off of the page, and Wolf's work does not leap! Consult my 1995 The Fables of Aesop from the QPBC for extensive comment on the movement from Tenniel to Wolf.

1867/82 Aesop's Fables: A New Version Chiefly from the Original Sources. Thomas James. With more than one hundred illustrations designed by (John) Tenniel and (Joseph) Wolf. Seventy-eighth Thousand. Hardbound. London: John Murray. £10 from Bazabooks, Edinburgh, through eBay, Oct., '10.

Here is another copy of the book first published in 1867. This copy is covered in blue cloth, but with a beautiful golden illustration with title and author embedded in the front cover. As I remark elsewhere, Tenniel's original 1848 work published by Murray apparently got such a negative response that, before reissuing it in 1851, the publisher asked Joseph Wolf to create replacements for many of the engravings, and Tenniel himself revised some of the others. Apparently Strahan published a Tenniel/Wolf edition in 1867, and this present, smaller-format book may be a later printing of that. The illustrations are surprisingly clean and clear for such a late printing. This printing still contains the 203 fables of the 1848 edition. MSA, the last fable, has six illustrations matching the six phases of this unusual fable. Consult my 1995 The Fables of Aesop from the QPBC for extensive comment on the movement from Tenniel to Wolf.

1867/74/98/1911 Aesop's Fables: A New Version Chiefly from the Original Sources. By Thomas James. With more than one hundred illustrations designed by Tenniel and Wolf. Third edition. Red cloth. Crown octavo. London: John Murray. $12 from Powell's, Beaverton, March, '96.

This little book, marked as the third edition, is almost identical with my 1867/74 Murray edition. This copy lists a first edition in 1874 and a second in 1898. See my comments under 1867/74. I will note the differences here. The work is done by a different printer (148). One or more early pages are missing before the engraving representing Aesop, listeners, animals, and a title chiselled in stone. The following title-page is newly typeset but identical except for the lacking indication of the quantity already printed. The list of illustrations has the same information but is newly typeset and placed now after the introduction. In fact, the typesetting is new throughout. The fable number now comes after the fable's title. Some illustrations are darker (32) and/or more distinct (33) than in the 1867/74 edition, but the plates certainly seem identical. There are in fact 103 illustrations. This edition is identified in the back advertisements as part of the Murray's Shilling Library.   Before those advertisements, there is again an index of titles.

1867/1912 Aesop's Fables: A New Version Chiefly from the Original Sources. Thomas James. John Tenniel/Joseph Wolf. Reprinting of the third edition. Hardbound. London: John Murray. £7.50 from Quinto Bookshop, London, May, '97.

Here is a 1912 reprinting of a book I already have listed as the 1911 third edition. Inscribed at Christmas, 1913. See my comments there. This reprinting lacks the advertisements after the index at the back. In a curious move, the title-page adds a "W" to "Albemarle Street." The spine removes the word "London" over John Murray at its base. The page facing the title-page dutifully notes this reprinting done in January of 1912 after the Third Edition of September, 1911.

1867? The Fables of Aesop. Translated into English by Samuel Croxall, D.D. and Sir Roger L'Estrange. With applications, morals, etc. by the Rev. G. F. Townsend and L. Valentine. New edition. With 110 original illustrations. London: Frederick Warne and Co. £36 at Ripping Yarns, London, May, '97.

This book is internally identical in its plates with that which I have listed by the same publisher under "1866?" Its few differences are these four: (1) It has a green and gold cover, (2) adds to the title-page "New Edition" and an address for the publisher, (3) gives a printer on the reverse of the title-page, and (4) lacks a page between the "Life of Aesop" and the first fable. Signatures are loose and have been taped in between 144 and 176. A signature is separating at 192-93. Otherwise it is in good condition. This book may have better paper and have experienced a better printing job than that; it may even be earlier, but I had already listed that under "1866?" and referred to it elsewhere, so this book is left with "1867?"

1868 Aesop's Fables. Edited by Edward Garrett. With 100 illustrations by J. Wolf, J.B. Zwecker, and T. Dalziel. Inscribed 1871. London: Strahan. $20 from Dan Gleason at Wessel & Lieberman Booksellers, Seattle, Oct., '97. Extra copy lacking the last six pages for $15 from Drusilla's, Baltimore, Nov., '91.

What a nice surprise! Dan saw my name go by and remembered me from years ago here in Omaha. This little book with a green-and-gold embossed cover has very good illustrations, particularly for the book's age. The plates are identical with those in the Lippincott edition of 1892, but that edition adds huge margins. The best illustrations are of the horse and the lion (75), the fox and the goat (81), DLS (97), WC (108), the eagle and the crow (119), and the fox and the mask (147). There are advertisements at the end.

1868 Aesop's Fables Complete. By Rev. T. James, M.A. No illustrator acknowledged. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Co. $25 from Yoffees, Jan., '92.

"Complete" indeed! Here in small format is James' version of 203 fables so often found with Tenniel's illustrations. These are not the Tenniel illustrations (though they seem to imitate Tenniel, e.g., on 147), nor apparently are they identical with those in Child's Own Fable Book (1848/1870?), which also uses James' text. One may thus be surprised to read in the introduction of James' thanks to Tenniel! That introduction contains excellent comments on the tradition and on James' eclecticism. AI at the back. There has been some coloring by young hands. A great, well-used example of Aesop in the second half of the nineteenth century.

1868 Aesop's Fables Illustrated. Illustrations after John Tenniel (not acknowledged). Hardbound. NY: The People's Edition: Samuel R. Wells. $49.95 from Robert Baillargeon, Hinsdale, MA, through EBay, Nov., '03.

I have had copies of this little book dated to 1870 and 1870/73. Now I have here a copy, in very good condition, which its seller proclaims as a first edition. It is dated 1868 and inscribed at Christmas that year by Richard Moore Winfield. This work features very small print. AI at the beginning and a list of the fifty-five illustrations. It seems to me that what we have here are copies of Tenniel's (not Wolfe's) work. They are now often signed by the engraver (e.g., Felter, Howland, or Orr). The binding is beginning to give way after all these years. As in the other copies, Wells' advertisements at the back of the book are strong on phrenology.

1868 Aesop's Fables in Words of One Syllable. By Mary Godolphin. Presumed first edition. Hardbound. NY: Felt & Dillingham. $44.60 from Simon Creet, Toronto, through eBay, July, '04. 

Wonders never cease. Over years I had worked my way back to what I thought was a first edition of Godolphin's work, published by James Miller in New York in 1869. Then I found an undated version by Cassell, Petter, and Galpin which was inscribed at Christmas in 1868. Now here is a dated 1868 edition by Felt & Dillingham in New York. The embossed golden title around an image of FG in the center of the cover is exactly the same as on the other two books. Inside, the text of the books seems identical up to 174, when each publisher begins his advertisements. This book has green cloth covers. The illustrations of "The Doves and the Mouse"; "The Kite, the Sow, and the Cat"; and FM seem to be missing. MSA is added (45). Other illustrations are placed at slightly different places: "The Squeak of a Pig" (23); "The Stag in the Lake" (58); "The Hog, Ox, Cow, Dog, and Sheep" (139); and MM (167). I first found this book and commented on it carefully at the Pierpont Morgan in New York. I found that Godolphin's versions for the ninety-nine fables here tend toward drastic results. Thus the fox in the well dies, and the wolf eats the shepherd boy who had cried "Wolf!" Godolphin has excellent morals, often proverbial; sometimes the moral is in fact another fable. There is a T of C at the front and a two-page set of advertisements at the back. See my comments on the Miller versions of both 1869 and 1874 and on the Cassell, Petter, and Galpin edition of 1868. This book is in fair condition.

1868 Fables de J. de la Fontaine Illustrées de 120 Gravures. Par J. Desandré et W.H. Freeman. Avec des notes et une préface par Décembre-Alonnier. Hardbound. Paris: Bernardin-Béchet. $60 from Old Editions, Buffalo, NY, Sept., '09.

Here is Bodemann #341.1, larger and with much more robust illustrations than in the edition which Bernardin-Béchet et Fils (notice the addition there of "et Fils," not found on this edition's title-page). There are 432 pages here to the 380 there. The fancy character of this first edition is suggested by the elaborate printer's design featuring "BB" on the title-page. Gilt on all edges. Heavy watermarked endpapers. Inscribed "Mary P. Brayley" with an added inscription "to Grace W. Brayley 1886." As I mentioned there, I like the images, for example, of the monkey and dolphin (129) and of the miser's hole (146). The illustrations in this edition jump off the page, especially when contrasted with those in the edition a year later. New favorites include the falling astrologer (facing 77) and "La Vieille et les deux Servantes" (facing 159). These are two of perhaps thirteen intercalated pages with no printing on their obverse. I do not find any remnant of them in the 1869 version. Strangely, one of these thirteen is printed on regular stock, like the normal pages: "Le Chat et le Rat" (facing 280). I had asked then whether that 1869 edition was a first edition. Now I have the answer by having the first edition from a year earlier! A lucky find on my one morning free in Buffalo.

1868 Fables de La Fontaine. Avec les Dessins de Gustave Doré. Inscribed 1880. Paris: Hachette. $150 from Blue Mountain Books, Catskill, NY, at Silver Spring, Sept., '91.

My best Doré. A huge and heavy book. A wonderful showpiece for the eighty-four full-page wood engravings; the many head and tail pieces come out unusually distinctly here too. The spine has been nicely reconstructed. Doré is still not my favorite LaFontaine illustrator, but this is an example of great work! To help in understanding the place this edition may have in the early printings of the work, consult Justin Schiller's Realms of Childhood, 149. A first deluxe edition came out in 1867, 2 volumes, printed in red and black inks on high quality China paper, with red borders. The same work was also issued in 58 weekly fascicles on lower quality paper. I take it that this edition of mine thus stands third in line.

1868 Fables de La Fontaine. Illustrations par Grandville. Paris: Garnier Frères, Libraires-Éditeurs. $85.50 from Walden Books, Camden Lock, London, July, '92. Extra copy with different cover for $115 from Charles Lloyd, Red Bank, NJ, Baltimore Antiquarian Fair, Aug., '91. Another extra copy in library binding from San Francisco Public Library for $40 at Bookmonger, San Francisco, Dec., '90.

What a master Grandville is! These three packagings of the same volume show a nice variety. The Walden volume is the best, with a green-and-red marbled binding embossed in gold, gilt page-edges, and marvelously preserved pages. (It lacks the page preceding the title page, with elephants and LaFontaine's bust.) The workhorse San Francisco Public Library copy probably made it through the great fire. All three have excellent runs of the Grandville illustrations. Compare these with the still better 1838 Fournier two-volume set and the very good English version (1860) by Elizur Wright. There is some foxing and spotting in all, especially the last two. Do not miss Hobbs' insightful comments on Grandville's illustrations. All three copies share the apparent misprint donnna in the first line of II 5.

1868 Fables in Verse: A Book for the Young.  Hardbound.  London: T. Nelson and Sons.  $28.34 from Lyceum Mercantile through Etsy, Oct., '22.

1868 Good Words (Magazine) for 1868. Edited by Norman MacLeod; W.R.S. Ralston is the author for the fables articles. And Illustrated by J.G. Finwell, A.B. Houghton, W. Small, Fr.A. Fraser, J. Wolf, J.B. Zwecker, J. Leighton, and others. Hardbound. Printed in London: Strahan & Co, Magazine Publishers. $25.50 from Abbey Antiquarian Books, July, '97.

As Abbey writes, the fable articles here precede and are different from their first appearance in book form a year later. For it was then that Ralston published the first edition of "Krilof and His Fables." See my comments on the third (1871) and fourth (1883) editions. The book smells of its many years! The three fable articles are on 39-46, including six illustrations on 40-41; 215-221, including six illustrations on 216-17; and 413-20, including six illustrations on 416-17. These are magazine articles. They comment on Krilof's views and particularly on Russian foibles. Thus one prose text after another is integrated into the article. In the book, there will be, after a preface and a memoir, a simple collection of texts. In fact, the selection of Krilof fables within the article here is excellent, and the author puts them into a good cultural and political context. At least some of the illustrations are the same as those in the third edition. The texts are close to those found in the published books. It makes sense to see the texts in the magazine here as forerunners of those fable texts there. I presume that Ralston had opportunity to edit and amend between his magazine articles and his book's first edition. The publisher of the magazine is of course the publisher of the third edition that I have. The print is minuscule! I needed a magnifying glass for normal reading. The index just after 774 assigns J.B. Zwecker and A.B. Houghton as illustrators for the eighteen illustrations in the three fable articles. Dalziel, Houghton, and Zwecker are the names I can make out on the illustrations. Dalziel is not mentioned on the title page, but there is reference to "others."

1868 The Children's Picture Fable-Book Containing One Hundred and Sixty Fables.  With Sixty Illustrations by Harrison Weir.  Hardbound.  NY: Harper & Brothers.  $16 from Arroyo Seco Books, Pasadena, Ca, Nov., '20.

1868 The Fables of Aesop. Texts from Croxall, not acknowledged. With Illustrations by Henry L. Stephens. Lithographed by Julius Bien. Hardbound. NY: Charles Scribner and Co. $19.98 from Richard Seidel, Largo, FL, through eBay, Dec., '12.

This book is a surprise related to a surprise. It is in fact the same book published a year earlier by Edward H. Weed, which I found by surprise eight years ago. Unfortunately, this copy is in poor condition and lacks some pages. I will include some remarks from the earlier edition. My awareness of what is lacking here is not complete. This is a large-formatted book, 10¼" x 12¼". Of its one hundred and ten fables, fifty-six are illustrated. The texts seem to come from Croxall, without acknowledgement. The illustrations are ambitious, and each receives its own page. Am I wrong, or do some, like "The Eagle and the Fox" (17), suffer from perspective problems? Among the better illustrations may be "The Lion and the Four Bulls" (11); "The Lion and the Other Beasts" (46); WC (65); and "The Cat and the Mice" (72). Is the wolf that preaches to the poor fox in the well in fact a preacher (18)? The wolf in sheep's clothing is seducing a female sheep as the shepherd comes upon him (30). Animals are dressed in human garb. The illustrations in fact sometimes remind me of Bennett's work. Not in Bodemann. There is an AI and a list of illustrations at the beginning. Missing text pages include 27-32, 35-36, and 65. Missing illustrations include "The Hunted Beaver" (38) and "The Fatal Marriage" (48). I count forty-eight illustrations present. The spine of this book is all but gone, but I think that the book is still lovely! 

1868 The Fables of Aesop with a Life of the Author.  Illustrated with One Hundred and Eleven Engravings from Original Designs by Herrick. Hardbound. NY: Hurd and Houghton.  See 1865/68.

1868? Aesop's Fables. With One Hundred Illustrations by J. Wolf, J.B. Zwecker, and T. Dalziel. Hardbound. London: David Bogue. $12.61 from The Book Haven, Market Rasen, LIN, UK, March, '00.

This book is internally apparently identical with the 1868 edition by Strahan that lists Edward Garrett as its editor. See my notes there. The cover has changed to a simple image of CP with "Aesop's Fables" above and below it on a slant. The image is green on black cloth with gold lettering. The illustrations seem surprisingly sharp. There are no advertisements in this edition. In fact, there is not even a blank page after the end of Fable CXV on 148. From all appearances some pages and/or endpapers have been lost. I think I am getting better at picking out Wolfe's work, and I do not favor it.

1868? Aesop's Fables in Words of One Syllable. Mary Godolphin. Dust jacket. Hardbound. Printed in NY. London/NY: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin. $7.99 from Brenda Ferrell, Charlotte, NC, through Ebay, July, '03.

Now this is very surprising. Over years I worked my way back to what I thought was a first edition of Godolphin's work, published by James Miller in NY in 1869. Now I have here in my hand, for $142 less, a copy inscribed at Christmas in 1868! Notice the different publisher. Of course, this copy from Cassell, Petter, and Galpin is not dated. The embossed golden title around an image of FG in the center of the cover is exactly the same. The basic conception of the spine is also identical. Inside, the books seem identical up to 174, when each publisher begins his advertisements. This book has red cloth covers. The outside spine is worn and cracked. There is here the stuff of mystery! See my comments on the Miller versions of both 1869 and 1874.

1868? Aesop's Fables in Words of One Syllable. Mary Godolphin. Hardbound. London/NY: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin. $20 from an unknown source, April, '11.

This book is identical with another, listed under "1868?", except for the color of its cover. This copy is blue, and that is red. This copy has two other features that I will mention. It is very tight: perhaps it sat closed for a very long time. And it has a tan stain above the lovely embossed golden center, illustrating FG. Let me include comments from that other copy. Now this is very surprising. Over years I worked my way back to what I thought was a first edition of Godolphin's work, published by James Miller in NY in 1869. Now I have here in my hand, for $142 less, a copy inscribed at Christmas in 1868! Notice the different publisher. Of course, this copy from Cassell, Petter, and Galpin is not dated. The embossed golden title around an image of FG in the center of the cover is exactly the same. The basic conception of the spine is also identical. Inside, the books seem identical up to 174, when each publisher begins his advertisements. See my comments on the Miller versions of both 1869 and 1874. 

1868? The Fables of Aesop. Translated into English by Samuel Croxall, D.D. and Sir Roger L'Estrange. With applications, morals, etc. by the Rev. G. F. Townsend and L. Valentine. With 110 original illustrations (by Herrick NA). Hardbound. London: The Chandos Classics: Frederick Warne and Co. $40 from an unknown source prior to Oct., '00.

At last I have found a copy--and now two--of an edition I found recommended early in my hunt for fable books. This book may be a good deal later than the date I am guessing for it. Compare with three other books, all by Warne, which I have listed under "1866?," "1867?," and "1869?" This edition has a brown cloth cover with black printing and some gold print background only on the spine. It does not say "New Edition" on the title-page. It lists an address for Warne. It gives the printer (R. Clay, Sons, and Taylor) on the reverse of the title-page. It has no page between the "Life of Aesop" and the first fable. The advertisements on the front endpapers claim 99 volumes in the Chandos Classics Series. The big learning occasioned by examining this book and the copy listed under "1869?" is that the illustrations here are by Herrick! They are exactly the same as those in his 1865 edition. That book claims 111 illustrations, perhaps including the illustration on the title-page, which does not occur here. The typeface is excellent in this printing. Compare it with the deteriorating typeface in the "1869?" edition. See my notes on the other volumes, especially on the possible roles played by L'Estrange and Valentine. This volume of course lacks Croxall's long applications, which Herrick includes, though perhaps not always complete.

1868? The Fables of La Fontaine. Translated into English Verse by Walter Thornbury. With illustrations by Gustave Doré. London and NY: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin. $200 at Arkadyan, August, '97.

Might this be the first edition of the English-language edition of Doré that Anne Stevenson Hobbs praises (100), especially for its large print and generous format? She lists 1868 as its date in brackets, which I take to indicate that there is no date in the book, as there is none here. There is some spotting and foxing early, and some variation in the paper from signature to signature. The large wood-engraved illustrations come off strong, like MM (405) and the human scene given for "The Two Fowls" (417). This is another heavy book, as I discovered in carrying it around on the rest of this trip! I have written to the Victoria and Albert to see if I can determine whether this is a first. See the French edition under 1868. Cassell published under his own name from 1849 through 1859. The firm had the name of "Cassell, Petter, and Galpin" from 1859 through 1883, so we have at least a terminus ante quem of 1883.

1869 Aesop's Fables: A New Version Chiefly from Original Sources. By Thomas James. With more than one hundred illustrations designed by Tenniel and Wolf. New Edition. Hardbound. Printed in London. Philadelphia/London: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Co./London: John Murray. $20 from Clare Leeper, July, '96.

This book is nearly identical with that from John Murray that I have listed under 1867/74. See my comments there. This edition places the list of illustrations where its page numbers should locate it rather than before the title-page, as there. The title-page here includes no "the" before "Original Sources." Even though this version includes both an American publisher and an English publisher, the printer remains the same: "R. Clay, Son, and Taylor, Printers, Bread Street Hill, London." Their mark is at the bottom of the closing AI. The purple cloth cover and spine of this edition are deteriorating and already show one hole.

1869 Aesop's Fables Illustrated. Illustrations taken from John Tenniel (NA). Hardbound. NY: The People's Edition: Samuel R. Wells. $5.95 from Alibris, Feb., '02.

About a week ago, I catalogued a surprising find, namely the first edition of 1867. At that time, I noted that I had worked my way back through editions of 1873, 1870, and 1868. Well, now, I seem to have completed the circuit! This edition of 1869 means that I have an edition per year from 1867 through 1870 and another from 1873. This edition is published by Samuel R. Wells. The book seems otherwise identical with those of 1867 and 1868, down to the broken typeface on the page numbers for the last two units in the beginning AI. The beginning also has a list of the fifty-five illustrations. Like the other copies, this book is in only fair condition.

1869 Aesop's Fables in French. Hardbound. NY: Leypoldt & Holt. $11.97 from Karen Hatch, Franktown, VA, through eBay, March, '04. 

This book reproduces the 1864 version published by Henry Holt. I do not detect any changes from that edition. Let me offer some of my comments from there. The advertisement following the title page claims that Aesop is the usual first book for learning French. LaFontaine is not mentioned; the French of the fables is taken from the Latin of Abbé Paul. There are fifty descriptions, one hundred fables (61-127), and a long dictionary (129-236). The earlier edition went through 237, and so I believe that there is a page missing, giving vocabulary after the word "vue." Inscribed in 1871.

1869 Aesop's Fables in Words of One Syllable. By Mary Godolphin. No illustrator acknowledged. First edition. Printed in NY. NY: James Miller. $150 from Cathy Sattler at Sat'n Rose Books, Silver Spring, MD, by mail, May, '99.

At long last I have worked my way back to a first edition of this important book. It is inscribed in 1879. I believe I have the book as done now by six different publishers. Blue cloth with gilt, including a lovely embossed design of a fox under grapes on the cover. I first found this book and commented on it carefully at the Pierpont Morgan in New York. I found that Godolphin's versions for the ninety-nine fables here tend toward drastic results. Thus the fox in the well dies, and the wolf eats the shepherd boy who had cried "Wolf!" Godolphin has excellent morals, often proverbial; sometimes the moral is in fact another fable. The seven illustrations include "The Doves and the Mouse" (frontispiece), "The Squeak of a Pig" (22), "The Stag in the Lake" (58), "The Kite, the Sow, and the Cat" (80), FM (124), "The Hog, Ox, Cow, Dog, and Sheep" (138), and MM (166). There is a T of C at the front and a two-page set of advertisements at the back. I am very happy to have found this book at last.

1869 Aesop's Fables in Words of One Syllable. Mary Godolphin. Hardbound. NY: James Miller. $18.07 from Jim & Cindy Knickerbocker, Hilliard, OH, through eBay, Dec., '06. Extra copy for $32 from Frederick Lorenson, Coventry, RI, through eBay, April, '04.

Here are two copies with brown covers that are slightly different from my best copy of the book, which has a blue cloth cover. Each of these is over $115 cheaper than that copy! All three copies have the same publication date and information on their title-pages. Both brown-covered copies are in poorer condition. The spine of the extra copy is deteriorating and has already lost one chip near the top. As I mention a propos of the blue-covered copy, I first found this book and commented on it carefully at the Pierpont Morgan in New York. I found that Godolphin's versions for the ninety-nine fables here tend toward drastic results. Thus the fox in the well dies, and the wolf eats the shepherd boy who had cried "Wolf!" Godolphin has excellent morals, often proverbial; sometimes the moral is in fact another fable. The colored illustrations, there and here, include "The Doves and the Mouse" (frontispiece), "The Squeak of a Pig" (22), "The Stag in the Lake" (58), "The Kite, the Sow, and the Cat" (80), FM (124), "The Hog, Ox, Cow, Dog, and Sheep" (138), and MM (166). MM seems to be missing in the extra copy, and FM occurs at 174. There is a T of C at the front and a two-page set of advertisements at the back.

1869 Aesop's Fables in Words of One Syllable. Mary Godolphin. Hardbound. NY: James Miller. $32 from Frederick Lorenson, Coventry, RI, through eBay, April, '04.

Here is a slightly different copy--almost $120 cheaper--of an apparent first-edition that I already have. Both have the same publication date and information on their title-pages. This copy is in generally poorer condition. It has brown cloth with gilt, whereas that copy has blue cloth with gilt. The spine here is deteriorating and has already lost one chip near the top. As I mention there, I first found this book and commented on it carefully at the Pierpont Morgan in New York. I found that Godolphin's versions for the ninety-nine fables here tend toward drastic results. Thus the fox in the well dies, and the wolf eats the shepherd boy who had cried "Wolf!" Godolphin has excellent morals, often proverbial; sometimes the moral is in fact another fable. The colored illustrations, there and here, include "The Doves and the Mouse" (frontispiece), "The Squeak of a Pig" (22), "The Stag in the Lake" (58), "The Kite, the Sow, and the Cat" (80), FM (transposed from 124 there to 175 here), and "The Hog, Ox, Cow, Dog, and Sheep" (138). MM (166) seems to be missing. There is a T of C at the front and a two-page set of advertisements at the back.

1869 Canadian Series of Readings Books: Second Book of Reading Lessons. Authorized by the Council of Public Instruction for Ontario. Inscribed in 1878. Toronto: James Campbell and Son. $10 at Spivey's, Kansas City, May, '93.

My first book from Canada, I believe. This is a small reader with twelve fables, six of them illustrated (at least one, 126, by Harrison Weir). New to me: "The Two Dogs" (20) and the long "The Bear and the Tomtit" (139). T of C at front.

1869 Eggs That Were Never Peacocks; Or Fables and Facts Designed to Teach Child-Wisdom. Frances Lee and Una Locke. Seven Illustrations. Hardbound. Bertie and Amy Books. NY: Carlton & Lanahan; Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden. Gift of Anne Adye, Jan., '06.

This is a small volume (about 4" x 6") containing nineteen teaching stories on some 136 pages. The title-story introduces us to Hugo the peacock, who thinks that the farm, its barn, the family that works it, and all the other animals on the farm are there to admire and to serve him. The story thus begins as a delightful exercise in egocentrism. Soon enough, the story moves to Maude, who has laid her first peacock-eggs and wants to hatch them before blundering Hugo breaks them. Alas, first peacock-eggs never hatch! The final paragraphs of the story suggest any number of future events. The author rounds off this story with a lesson on God's care for every individual. The title-page had indicated, after all, that the book was published by Hitchcock and Walden's "Sunday-School Department." The second story, "Sour Grapes in a New Form" (25), follows the lives of several flies in a New England home during spring; it urges "Be content with such things as ye have." What a lovely gift!

1869 Fables de J. de la Fontaine. Avec des notes et une préface par Décembre-Alonnier. Illustrées de 100 Gravures par J. Desandré et W.H. Freeman. Hardbound. Paris: Bernardin-Béchet et Fils. $19.99 from John Newman, Chambersburg, PA, through eBay, July, '05.

This little volume is identical, except for its cover, with later volumes I have from Urbino in Boston in 1870 and from Bernardin-Béchet et Fils in Paris in 1875. (There may be some small changes in the 1885 printing from the same publisher.) Here there are pictorial boards, though it is hard to make out the images on either front or back cover. Canvas spine. These may be among the best copies of the work of Desandré and Freeman. I continue to like the images, for example, of the monkey and dolphin (120) and of the miser's hole (135). Now my question is: Might this be a first edition?

1869 Fables Original and Selected. Illustrated by numerous engravings by Orrin Smith, Breviere, etc. after designs by J.J. Grandville. With an introduction by G. Moir Bussey. Hardbound. NY: D. Appleton & CO. $15 from Walk a Crooked Mile Books, Philadelphia, Jan., '02.

This book reproduces completely, as far as I can tell, the edition I have listed under "1863." There is still a "Presented To .and From. ." page just after the title-page. Book I's "insignia" page here comes before, not after, the AI. See my comments there, on the edition listed under "1842?" and on the 1842 hand-colored edition. Inscribed January 1st, 1869. The spine is crumbling.

1869 Krilof and His Fables.  W.R.S. Ralston.  Hardbound.  London: Strahan & Co.  $9.99 from bluebirds15 through Ebay, March, '19.

1869? Aesop's Fables. Text based chiefly upon Croxall, La Fontaine, and L'Estrange. Revised and Rewritten by J.B. Rundell. Illustrated by Ernest Griset. Apparent first edition. Hardbound. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin. £60 from John Williams, Swindon, Wiltshire, UK, by mail, Jan., '99. Extra copy, perhaps inscribed in 1870, for $100 from the Book Hive, Plymouth, MN, July, '04 

It looks to me as though I have had a great piece of luck and have here a first edition of this work that would be so often reprinted. All the data square with Bodemann #344.1, including the lack of a printed date. The 244 pages, including an AI at the end, do not include the extra 132 fables and 32 illustrations added in a later (third?) edition, which Hobbs dates to 1893. The illustrations here are very good in a book in good condition. Hobbs says of Griset's illustrations: "Some of the wood engravings have his customary light and whimsical touch; others are powerful and macabre in Doré's manner, with similar chiaroscuro contrasts" (102). I find three types of Griset illustrations here among the ninety-three listed at the book's front. First and most impressive there are the full-page wood-engravings. They and their blank backs are included in the book's pagination. They are stark and even frightening sometimes. Some strong examples here would include LM (20), WC (29), "The Mountain in Labor" (69), FK (77), "Mercury and the Woodman" (92), FG (with three foxes, 101), "The Eagle and the Crow" (109), "The Bear and the Beehives" (141), "The Thief and the Dog" (an Eskimo, 212), and "The Nurse and the Wolf" (237). There are also some partial-page illustrations like these. Some good examples here are "The Two Frogs" (1), "The Fox and the Lion" (185), and MSA (227). There are, finally, some partial-page scenes with cartoon-like figures, e.g., "The Peacock and the Crane" (49), "The Boar and the Ass" (80), "The Ass Carrying an Idol" (155), "The Wolf, the She-Goat, and the Kid" (177), and "The Old Woman and the Empty Cask" (200). Bodemann's description fits right down to the eight pages of advertisements at the end. This book is a treasure, and I am lucky to have found it!

1869? Aesop's Fables. Text based chiefly upon Croxall, La Fontaine, and L'Estrange.  Revised and Rewritten by J.B. Rundell. Illustrated by Ernest Griset. Hardbound. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin. $50 from an unknown source, June, '05.

I already have a copy of this fine book with a green cover. Here is a copy with a blue cover. It is perhaps in better condition. This copy had been in the Lerner Library Collection. I will repeat my comments from the green-covered copy. It looks to me as though I have had a great piece of luck and have here a first edition of this work that would be so often reprinted. All the data square with Bodemann #344.1, including the lack of a printed date. The 244 pages, including an AI at the end, do not include the extra 132 fables and 32 illustrations added in a later (third?) edition, which Hobbs dates to 1893. The illustrations here are very good in a book in good condition. Hobbs says of Griset's illustrations: "Some of the wood engravings have his customary light and whimsical touch; others are powerful and macabre in Doré's manner, with similar chiaroscuro contrasts" (102). I find three types of Griset illustrations here among the ninety-three listed at the book's front. First and most impressive there are the full-page wood-engravings. They and their blank backs are included in the book's pagination. They are stark and even frightening sometimes. Some strong examples here would include LM (20), WC (29), "The Mountain in Labor" (69), FK (77), "Mercury and the Woodman" (92), FG (with three foxes, 101), "The Eagle and the Crow" (109), "The Bear and the Beehives" (141), "The Thief and the Dog" (an Eskimo, 212), and "The Nurse and the Wolf" (237). There are also some partial-page illustrations like these. Some good examples here are "The Two Frogs" (1), "The Fox and the Lion" (185), and MSA (227). There are, finally, some partial-page scenes with cartoon-like figures, e.g., "The Peacock and the Crane" (49), "The Boar and the Ass" (80), "The Ass Carrying an Idol" (155), "The Wolf, the She-Goat, and the Kid" (177), and "The Old Woman and the Empty Cask" (200). Bodemann's description fits right down to the eight pages of advertisements at the end. This book is a treasure, and I am lucky to have found it!

1869? Aesop's Fables.  Text based chiefly upon Croxall, La Fontaine, and L'Estrange. Revised and Rewritten by J.B. Rundell.  Illustrated by Ernest Griset.  Hardbound.  London and NY: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin.  $39.99 from David Paulhus, Cornish, Maine, April, '18.

1869? The Fables of Aesop. Translated into English by Samuel Croxall, D.D. and Sir Roger L'Estrange. With applications, morals, etc. by the Rev. G. F. Townsend and L. Valentine. With 110 original illustrations (by Herrick NA). Hardbound. London: The Chandos Classics: Frederick Warne and Co. £10 from Ripping Yarns, London, by mail, Oct., '98.

At last I have found a copy--and now two--of an edition I found recommended early in my hunt for fable books. This book may be a good deal later than the date I am guessing for it. Compare with three other books, all by Warne, which I have listed under "1866?," "1867?," and "1868?" This edition has a red cloth cover with gold printing. It does not say "New Edition" on the title-page. It gives the printer (the Dalziel Brothers) only on 364. It has a page between the "Life of Aesop" and the first fable. The single page of advertisement at the back of the book claims over 130 volumes in the Chandos Classics Series. The big learning occasioned by this book for me is that the illustrations here are by Herrick! They are exactly the same as those in his 1865 edition. That book claims 111 illustrations, perhaps including the illustration on the title-page, which does not occur here. There is a black-and-white frontispiece here of birds, but it seems to have been done in a different style. The typeface is deteriorating by this printing, as one can see if one compares this copy to that which I have listed under "1868?" See my notes on the other volumes, especially on the possible roles played by L'Estrange and Valentine. This volume of course lacks Croxall's long applications, which Herrick includes, though perhaps not always complete.

1870 Aesop's Fables Illustrated. The People's Edition. (Engravings designed by Tenniel, not acknowledged here.) NY: Samuel R. Wells. $45 from Greg Williams, March, '92.

My best and earliest copy of this thin work. It probably gets the prize for the smallest print in my collection. AI at the beginning and a list of illustrations. Tenniel's illustrations remain wonderful, even when indistinctly printed, as sometimes here. The fables are very brief; there are several to a page. The last pages feature crazy advertisements for Wells' books, including phrenology. It is hard to see how the 1873 edition changed anything from this prototype.

1870 Fables de Florian -- illustrées de 72 gravures.  Notes by H. de Suckau.  W.H. Freeman and (Henri Emmanuel Felix) Phillippoteaux.  Hardbound.  Paris: Bernardin-Béchet et Fils.  $24.93 from crealivres, Fontenelle, France, Jan., ‘21.  

1870 Fables de J. de la Fontaine. Avec des notes et une préface par Décembre-Alonnier. Illustrées de 100 gravures par J. Desandré et W.-H. Freeman. Boston: S.R. Urbino, Libraire. $15 at Titles, Jan., '89.

A handy little volume of the complete fables. Very good paper. The engravings are nicely done--but most lack sparkle. The best are of the monkey and dolphin (120) and of the miser's hole (135). Identical with the 1875 edition and with the 1885 edition from Bernardin-Béchet except for the cover, publisher, printer, and date.

1870 Fables de La Fontaine. Illustrations de Grandville reportées sur bois par A. Desperet, gravées par Brend'Amour. Tours: Alfred Mame et Fils. $15 from Scavengers of Georgetown, Aug., '91.

A fine little book with 240 small, very good imitations of Grandville's illustrations. It takes close looking to see how the wood-engraver departs from Grandville. AI at the back. The first illustration is slightly colored, there is an inserted newspaper illustration (28), and on 113 mer is miscorrected into mere. A delightful little find!

1870 Fables of Aesop and Others with Instructive Applications. By Samuel Croxall and Other Moralists. Illustrated by One Hundred and Thirty Engravings. Hardbound. NY: Allen Brothers. $15.50 from Barbara Supernowicz, Cameron Park, CA, through Ebay, May, '99.

This book is identical with the two Miller editions of the same title and size, which I list under "1865" and "1890?" See my comments there. This has the same markings embossed on its covers as the 1865 Miller book, though the cloth of this cover seems to have more of a purplish hue. The base of the spine here reads "Leavitt & Allen Bros," as do the advertisements at the back, while the title-page speaks only of "Allen Brothers." Having just catalogued a number of Croxall editions, I can say of this one that it sometimes edits Croxall's applications; for example, it drops the first two sentences of FK (16) and uses only parts of the first sentence of BW (230). It does not follow the order of Croxall's edition of 196 fables; thus CJ is the tenth fable here, not the first. One example of a non-Croxall fable here is "The Lynx and the Mole" on 131. The story is not Dodsley's, which includes a hunter, but the illustration here does include a hunter with the required javelin! The story is rather as we find it in Opper. Now what would have been a source for this fable back then? L'Estrange? By contrast, "The Diamond and the Loadstone" (193) comes, with some editing, from Dodsley XXX.18. One way to notice some non-Croxall fables is that they have shorter applications than others! As in the Miller editions, some of the usual Croxall features before the fables are missing, namely the dedication to Halifax and the patriotic preface. There is, as in Croxall, an AI. There is also a three-page essay "Aesop and His Fables" and a charming frontispiece, which includes two humans at the center and a fox with a mirror at the bottom. The illustrations are again framed rectangles generally including a corner-cropped image or sometimes an oval. Not all fables are illustrated. The illustrations are only loosely after the Kirkall models; they seem not to follow the patterns set down by either the Mozley editions of 1804 and 1807 or even the Derby & Jackson edition of 1859. This copy, inscribed in 1871, was in the Placerville City Library.

1870 Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse. With Twenty-four Illustrations from Drawings by Harrison Weir. London: Griffith and Farran. $75 at The Bookstall, San Francisco, Aug., '94.

This is my earliest Weir, and I find these engravings (executed by either Greenaway or Butterworth and Heath) new by comparison with the many other Weir illustrations I have. Besides the twenty-four full-page illustrations, there are the smaller designs on the title page and with the first and last fables. The texture of Weir's animals here is unusual, and there is something tableau-like, inactive, about his scenes. The best of the illustrations is, I believe, of the jackdaw and eagle (78). There are one-hunded and seven fables. The front end-paper is lacking. There is a T of C, with a list of illustrations, at the front.

1870 Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse. With Twenty-four Illustrations from Drawings by Harrison Weir. Hardbound. London: Griffith and Farran. $30 from From an unknown source, May, '10.

Here is another binding of a book I have already in two other bindings. This time we have a standard cloth library binding from the Brooklyn Public Library. I am happy to see that it was taken out by some ten different people between 1930 and 1948. Even in a well-used book like this one, Weir's illustrations in this edition are sharp. Because it is differently bound, I will keep this book in the collection alongside the other two bindings. I include some comments from their listing. After some study of Weir in 2000, I look back on this book as a very fortunate find. The engravings (executed by either Greenaway or Butterworth and Heath) are different from the several other sets of Weir illustrations I have. The latter seem to date back to "The Children's Picture Fable Book" (1860) and "Three Hundred Aesop's Fables Literally Translated" (1865 and 1867). The illustrations here fill out a full rectangle. The texture of Weir's animals here is unusual, and there is something tableau-like, inactive, about his scenes. The best of the illustrations is, I believe, of the jackdaw and eagle (78). There are one-hunded and seven fables. There is a Tof C, with a list of illustrations, at the front. Besides the twenty-four full-page illustrations, there are the smaller designs on the title page and with the first and last fables. 

1870 Niederdeutscher Aesopus: Zwanzig Fabeln und Erzählungen aus einer Wolfenbüttler Hs. des XV. Jahrhunderts. Hoffmann von Fallersleben. Paperbound. Strassburg: Verlag von Karl J. Trübner. €46 from Hesperus Antiquariat, Hannover, Feb., '02.

Here is a German-language article of some 83 pages on a Dutch manuscript of the fifteenth century. It represents typically careful German work. The texts themselves are listed with their Latin titles on 15. They represent a selection from some 125 fables in a collection that looks incomplete. The titles suggest material well known to the fable tradition. After each fable is a list of unusual vocabulary with the German meaning of each word. On 76 there is a "Verzeichniss der erklärten Wörter" and on 80 a "Wortlese." The work is apparently dedicated to "Der Maatschappij der Nederlandsche Letterkunde zu Leiden aus dankbarer Erinnerung an den Sommer 1821 in Leiden." Good memory 49 years later! And now this booklet has lasted 141 years and is quite fragile. It took me nine years to get to cataloguing it! It may be a less valuable addition to the collection than its price would suggest! 

1870 Old Friends and New Faces. Comprising: Robinson Crusoe, Queer Characters, Aesop's Fables, and Cock Sparrow. Illustrated by Martin Kronheim. Hardbound. London/New York: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin. $25.00 from Brattle Book Shop, Nov., '97.

This large-format book never prints on both sides of the page. The "Aesop's Fables" section begins with a full-page text and full-page colored illustration of 2W, marred by pencil scribblings. There follow five pages of quartets of fable texts and -- on what would be opposing pages if another totally blank page were not inserted in between -- matching quartets of colored fable pictures. My favorites among the illustrations include the long-nosed woman sniffing the empty cask, the blackamoor being scrubbed, and the menacing owner of the ass in the lion-skin. This illustration I had already had as a separate piece, no doubt cut out of a copy of this book! The title-page and first page of "Robinson Crusoe" are missing. The spine is chipped and the binding weak. The front cover is embossed in gold with a picture of a clothed ass reading a book. I was very lucky to find this on Brattle's restricted third floor. A recent copy on the net with one torn illustration went for $306! The Lilly exhibit in Indiana highlighted the Kronheim chromolithographic oil color process as a new method of illustration appropriate for children's books. Though in the exhibitor's words "it was fancy and fun," the process and the book did little to add to quality illustration or [sic; of?] fable literature."

1870 Romulus : Die paraphrasen des Phaedrus und die Aesopische fabel in mittelalter.  Hermann Oesterley.  Hardbound.  Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung.  €40 from Antiquariat Kretzer, Kirchhain, Germany, Oct., '18.

1870 Sexten Fabler af La Fontaine til Udenadslæren i Skolen.  Med Ordforklaring og Oversættelse udgivne af Fr. Gjertsen.  Paperbound.  Kristiania (Oslo), Norway: Forlagt af Alb. Cammermeyer.  250 Kroner from Norlis Antikvariat, Oslo, July, '14.  

1870/73 Aesop's Fables Illustrated. The People's Edition. (Engravings designed by Tenniel, not acknowledged here.) NY: Samuel R. Wells. Second identical copy, with better illustrations but without cover, from Delavan Booksellers for $15, Aug, '87. Third copy, with brown cover, no title page, and slightly different advertisements, for $3 from Wordsmith, Lincoln, NE, May, '91.

AI at the beginning and a list of illustrations. Tenniel's illustrations are wonderful; they are best, though not terribly distinct, in the coverless copy. Both books with covers are falling apart. Fortunately, the fables are very brief; there are several to a page. The last pages feature crazy advertisements for Wells' books, including phrenology.

1870? Chansons de France pour les Petits Français. Avec accompagnements de J.B. Weckerlin. Illustrations par M.B. de Monvel. Paris: Plon-Nourrit et Cie. $10 from Adobe Bookshop, San Francisco, June, '89.

Pages 28-9 present "Le Rat de Ville et le Rat des Champs" in music with two superb illustrations. The story ends with an invitation to city mouse to come to the country for dinner tomorrow. Boutet de Monvel's illustrations are superb throughout. The book has suffered some damage. Its pages are loose.

1870? Child's Own Fable Book. Including Aesop's Fables (I) and Fables (II). Texts from Thomas James and James Northcote (NA). Illustrations after James Tenniel and James Northcote (NA). Hardbound. Spine: Boys' and Girls' Fairy Library: Book of Fables. NY: Leavitt and Allen. $25 from NY, Jan., '90.

This fat little book will delight those tracking fable publication. A frontispiece from Weir introduces a book with Thomas James' 1848 introduction placed (Theddington Vicarage) but not signed. James' 203 fables in I (not acknowledged as his) are illustrated chiefly (solely?) by illustrations after James Tenniel (not acknowledged). Part II presents 114 fables (T of C at the rear) in a variety of textual and artistic forms. Many are signed "J.N." (James Northcote), and the illustrations with them are those of Northcote's 1857 edition. On the spine is "Boys' and Girls' Fairy Library: Book of Fables." This had not been there on the 1860 edition. This copy is inscribed 1875. This book has changed the typesetting (but apparently not the text) on pages v and vi of the first part from what it was in the 1860 edition. There is still the misprint on 251 of the second part: cvi for cxiv.

1870? Chwedlau neu Ddammegion Aesop. (Welsh bibliographical information.) Undated and unpaginated. Wrexham: Hughes and Son. Bound with Ail Gyfres O Chwedlau neu Ddammegion Aesop...Kriolf, La Fontaine, etc, same place and publisher, 1870. $15 at Logic and Literature, DC, Aug., '91.

What a wonderful little treasure. The first book has a frontispiece of Aesop holding a scroll sitting in the countryside surrounded by animals. 140 fables, most with rectangular little illustrations reminiscent of Croxall. The best among them: TB (#49) and the dog with the thief (#117). Morals are stated throughout. The second book has 185 fables, some with repeat illustrations (I #107 = II p100, I #124 = II p78). The illustrations seem to be more fun here. The best among them: the freezing man and the dead swallow (12), the flying wig (14), DLS (66), Fortuna (106), the miser (124), and the child thief beating the adult thief (140). Is Krylov "Kriolf" in Welsh?

1870? De Fabelen van La Fontaine. Nagevolgd door J.J.L. Ten Kate. Geillustreerd met 81 Platen en vele Vignetten door Gustave Doré. Tweede Druk. Amsterdam: Uitgevers-Maatschappy "Elsevier." 150 Guilders at Kok in Amsterdam, Dec., '88.

Maybe the loveliest book I have. Beautiful large illustrations in a lavish book. Four types of illustrations: full-page dark, part-page dark, part-page light, and vignettes (often witty and pointed). Some of the excellent illustrations: the stargazer in the well (101), the horse and the wolf (287), and the farmer and the snake (367). The FG illustration differs from the traditional one that I know.

1870? Fables Choisies d'Ésope (Fables d'Ésope on spine). L. Humbert. Hardbound. Paris: Garnier Frères. €18 from Librairie Sciardet, Le Bourg, France, through abe, August, '06.

The full subtitle is: "Nouvelle Édition Classique en Vue de l'Étude Simultanée de la Grammaire et des Racines, Suivie des Fables Imitées d'Ésope par la Fontaine et d'un Lexique Nouveau." Whew! Good things! The book starts with la Fontaine's life of Aesop in French. There follow forty Greek fables on 57 pages. There is a T of C for these on 125-126. Each fable has copious notes specifying the particular form of the word. For the first fable of five lines, with an epimythium of three lines, there are twelve notes on some twenty-three lines of type. Then, for each fable, there is a list of root words and important derivatives, with their French equivalents and also French words using the root. For the first fable, this list is over a page in length. The Greek presented here hyphenates between a word's stem and its ending. Thus the noun "oikian" is written "oikia-n." After the forty Greek fables come thirty-five fables "Imitées d'Ésope." These fables match in their numbers the first forty: they are la Fontaine's imitations of them. An early note mentions that five of them (6, 12, 13, 14, and 38) have no parallel in la Fontaine. This second group simply skips those numbers. Again, there is a T of C for these, using la Fontaine's titles, on 126-127. Pages 92-123 present a copious Greek-to-French dictionary. The book has a lovely leather spine featuring as title "Fables d'Ésope," and covers of mottled red and brown paper over boards. The book is in excellent condition, and has a place-marking ribbon intact.

1870? Fables de Florian. Avec des Notes par Madame Amable Tastu. Suivie d'un Choix de Fables de nos meilleurs Fabulistes. Illustrées de 20 dessins par Bouchot. Hardbound. Paris: Librairie de l'Enfance et de la Jeunesse, P.-C. Lehuby. $35 from Hoboken Books, Hoboken, NJ, through Bibliofind, Oct., '97.

The standard five books of fables by Florian--illustrated with the twenty engravings of Bouchot's work--are followed here by one or more fables by about thirty-five other French authors without illustration. This is a sturdy and heavy edition, with a leather spine and place-marking ribbon. The "3" of this printer is practically identical with a "5" and a "1" here can look like a "4." The illustrations are fine. They all have the same frame, use different paper from that on which the text is printed, are not printed on the back, and present dressed animals. Are some of them (e.g. 168, 180, 186) tinted with brown, or is that normal foxing? Among the best illustrations are: "La Taupe et les Lapins" (32); "Les deux Chats" (56); "L'Hermine, le Castor et le Sanglier" (108); "L'Ane et la Flùte" (180); and "Le Hérisson et les Lapins" (202).

1870? Fables de Florian suivie de Son Théatre. Précédées d'un jugement par la Harpe et d'observations littéraires par M. Sainte-Beuve. Vignettes par Granville (sic). Hardbound. Paris: Garnier Frères, Libraires-Éditeurs. $75.

This is a fine little volume. Florian's fables make up the first 180 pages. The 110 fables seem to be all here. I find 18 illustrations. I am not certain whether these are by Grandville or after him. Many of them are signed by Grandville. Many of them are distinctly printed here. Among my favorites here are "Le Chat et le Miroir" (11); "La Carpe et les Carpillons" (15); "Le Bouvreuil et le Corbeau" (45):"L'Enfant et le Miroir" (49); and "Le Chat et le Moineau" (72, my favorite). Is it not strange that Garnier would misspell Grandville's name?! I cannot remember any more where I found this book!

1870? Fables de la Fontaine. Précédées de la vie d'Ésope, accompagnées de notes nouvelles par D.S. Illustrations par K Girardet. (Many engravings are signed "Sargent.") Nouvelle édition, dans laquelle on aperçoit d'un coup d'oeil la moralité de la fable. NY: George R. Lockwood. $7 somewhere, Spring, '96?

This book seems to be inscribed in 1873, and thus I guess at 1870 as a publication date. The book is largely identical with my three "Mame" editions of this book (1890, 1890/92, and 1890/1901). See my comments there, especially under 1890. This book has the same pagination as all of them. However, it has a different title-page, a different cover, a bird on a branch as the symbol on the title-page, and no period after the initial "K" for the illustrator. It is still printed by Mame in Tours (see the last page). The page-edges are nicely marbled. This is my only Girardet from Lockwood.

1870? Fables de La Fontaine. Précédées d'une Notice sur sa vie et son Oeuvre par A. Morel. J. Hetzel. Illustrations par Eugène Lambert. Hardbound. Paris: Bibliothèque d'Éducation et de Récréation: J. Hetzel et Cie. $125 from Watermark Books through Interloc, Jan., '98. Extra copy--with a gold-embossed cover but some pencil marks and slightly torn pages-- for 750 Francs from Henry Veyrier, Clignancourt, Paris, July, '98

I find this book disappointing. It is large, with gilt page-edges. It contains some 113 full-page illustrations by Louis Eugène Lambert (1825-1900), but most of them seem to me simple, direct, dull, and predictable. Some are in fact sketchy. A typical illustration might be that for "Le Renard et le Bouc" (127). Some better illustrations include a symbol overhead that suggests the irony of the fable; thus in FC (7) a censor blows smoke. Similarly above DW (14), there is a bird escaping from its cage. Among the better illustrations are those for the stag and vine (261), the stag seeing itself in water (285), and the wolf and the hunter (444). It is unusual to picture TT after the fall (515). I am very glad to have found this book but sorry that it does not offer more. I was unaware of the then uncatalogued first copy when I found the second in Paris. It is ironic that the book's two prices are within a dollar of each other! The Watermark copy is inscribed "Maggie Donald: First Prize for French. 1870-71." It shows some water-staining outside the carefully drawn margins, i.e. in the top and bottom inch of many pages. Because it has a plain cover and spine, it lacks the Veyrier copy's mention (on the cover) "Collection J. Hetzel." Because each copy has flaws, I will keep both in the collection. Paul LeRoi writes in G. de Cherville's Les Chiens et les Chats d'Eugène Lambert "En 1862, Lambert illustra un La Fontaine, que la maison Lahure publiait par livraisons." (xxiv). The relationship of this work to my editions is not yet known to me.

1870? Fables de La Fontaine.  J. Hetzel.  Illustrations par Eugène Lambert.  A. Morel.  Hardbound.  Paris: Bibliothèque d'Éducation et de Récréation:  J. Hetzel et Cie.  $90 from Strand, NY, August, '16.

1870? Fables No. 2. Illustrations by Stephens and others. Paperbound. Juvenile Classics from the Rutherford Park Press. $12 from Eric Maloney, West Peterborough, NH, through eBay, April, '08.

Sixteen large-format (10" x 13") pages plus four full-page chromolithographs. Apparently this is the second in a planned series of eight folios on fables. It includes pages 16-32. The cover's description includes this: "Quarto size; compiled from Aesop, LaFontaine, and the Russian of the celebrated Kriloff. Some of these are old and favored acquaintances, while others are here published for the first time in this country. Embellished with handsome full-page illustrations, printed in colors, from characteristic designs by Stephens and others. Illuminated cover. Issued in 8 numbers, each number complete in itself. Nos. 1 and 2 now ready. Price per No. 50 cents." I am not sure what the "illuminated cover" entails. The front flyleaf includes "To Florrie from her teacher. Tina J. Tillon. 1872." The back cover is missing. The four chromolithographs are ambitious but flawed: the various colors are not exactly enough placed, and the resulting impression is blurred. These include "The Lark and Her Young Ones" (17); FG (24); "The Wolf Turned Shepherd" (27); and "The Fox and the Sick Lion" (30). I am surprised to find a bulldog with a gun in FG! "The Lark and Her Young Ones" and "The Wolf Turned Shepherd" are colored versions of Dore. Two of the first four texts in this booklet come from Croxall. I take this to be a large, worthy early experiment in chromolithography. The front cover advertises Little Workers by J.C. Beard, "in preparation and shortly to be issued." The Library of Congress dates this book of Beard's to 1871. Thus I have guessed at a date of 1870 for this publication.

1870? J. de La Fontaine: Fables. Notices et annotations par Maurice Morel. Oudry photographs. Hardbound. Paris: Bibliothèque Larousse. $30 from Old Millenium's Books and Jewels, through eBay, March, '11.

Two volumes bound together in cloth covers showing a maze pattern. Tome I features ten illustrations that seem to be photographs of Oudry illustrations and the frontispiece portrait of La Fontaine by Rigaud. Tome II has eight photographs of Oudry illustrations. To my surprise, the Oudry illustrations are printed on both sides of a single page of higher quality paper in the first volume but on both sides of standard paper like all the other pages in the second volume. There are surprises in the history of publishing! Each illustration page includes several key verses from La Fontaine's text. I am surprised that I have not included this text in the collection earlier. It seems to be a standard item. Morel appears in Bodemann under #345.1 as a contributor to the 1869-79 Hetzel edition that featured the art of Eugene Lambert. "Ohio" is the most specific location I can find for "Old Millenium." 

1870? Les Fables de Florian. 8me Série. Imagerie d'Épinal. Paperbound. [Paris]: Imagerie d'Épinal: Pellerin & Cie. £55 from Robin Greer, London, Oct., '07.

Here is a 48-page pamphlet in good condition. The cover shows "The Rabbit and the Teal." The title-page has a black-and-white design of a kangaroo. The text itself then offers fifteen handcolored plates. They are only slightly less brilliant than Épinal's colors usually are. The designs are relatively simple. Among the best are "The Monkey and the Magic Lantern"; "The Squirrel, the Dog, and the Fox"; "The Female Monkey, the Monkey, and the Nut"; "King Alphonse"; and "The Cat and the Spyglass." The hand-coloring of the images is exquisite.

1870? Original Fables.  By Mrs. Prosser (Eleanor B.).  Profusely Illustrated by Ernest Griset, Harrison Weir, Noel Humphreys, and other eminent Artists.  First printing?.  Hardbound.  London: The Religious Tract Society.  $15 from Princeton Antiques Bookshop, Atlantic City, through Ebay, May, '22.

1870? The Fables of Aesop and Others Translated Into English With Instructive Applications. By Samuel Croxall. Hardbound. Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo. Gift of Leon Klimczyck, S.J., March, '99.

How wonderful of Leon to find this for me on the web! It is yet another variation in the re-use of Croxall's translation of 1722. This one uses the plates used in the "J.B.L. & Co." edition that I have listed under "1880?" This book is the same size, about 4" x 5¾". It retains the colored FG frontispiece, but it lacks the black-and-white illustrations interleaved in that edition. After it finishes the fables, as that edition had, on 216, it adds the usual Croxall "Index" of virtues and qualities (not found in the J.B.L. copy I have) and then, without previous announcement, "Moral and Entertaining Anecdotes" through 288. There are also twelve pages of advertisements for Nimmo's books. Inscribed in 1874. The cover is green cloth with gold embossing, now taped crudely in several ways. A lovely gift!

1870? The Fables of Aesop with Instructive Applications. By Samuel Croxall. Illustrated with one hundred engravings. The Cottage Library? London: Milner and Sowerby. $20 by mail from Nancy Stewart, Beaverton, Sept., ’96.

This is a wonderful little find, 3¾" x 5". Most Croxall editions (including the earliest) have 196 fables. This edition has 211 fables. Miller’s 1865 edition has 248. In fact, there are 208 here and then three separate "Select Fables." The dedication to Lord Halifax has been dropped. To the normal Croxall preface a last paragraph has been added. If young people will read it two or three times, the original authors and the present compilers will be thought to have spent their time well. Notice the twofold group spoken of here. There is an unusual fold-out frontispiece of Aesop writing in the presence of the animals. The small illustrations are simple but charming. They are all done in an unadorned rectangle format; the ovals that started with Kirkall are not to be found, nor is there any ornamentation of the rectangular frame. The influence of Bewick on the illustrations seems strong (e.g., on 7 and 78). The approach to representing SW in terms of crossing forces making an "X" is novel (62). The monkey-mother here has inadvertently dashed the favorite child’s head against a stone (265). Among the best and/or most typical illustrations are those for "The Nurse and the Wolf" (60), "The Peacock and the Crane" (73), "The Lion in Love" (99), "The Two Crabs" (156), and "The Horse and the Lion" (201). The frontispece and title-page are separated, and the spine is cracking. T of C at the front. Inscribed in 1874. The end of the book presents a 32-page catalogue of available books.

1870?/1979 Chansons de France pour les Petits Français. Paperback facsimile of the original. Avec accompagnements de J.B. Weckerlin. Illustrations par M.B. de Monvel. Paris: Plon-Nourrit et Cie. Printed by Maury. Paris: lutin poche de l'école des loisirs. $4.50 at The Iliad Bookshop, North Hollywood, Feb., '97. Extra copy of the 1988 printing by Aubin at Poitiers for $7.95 at Schoenhof's, Dec. '89.

This is a nice simple reproduction for kids of Boutet de Monvel's marvelous work, including the "Rat de Ville" song. See my copy of the original hardbound version (1870?). The extra copy here has a lighter color cover than the earlier copy.

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1871 Bewick's Select Fables of Aesop and Others. In Three Parts: Fables Extracted from Dodsley, Fables with Reflections in Prose and Verse, Fables in Verse. Writer not acknowledged, perhaps Goldsmith. Faithfully reprinted from the Rare Newcastle Edition published by T. Saint in 1784. Wood Engravings by Thomas Bewick. London: Bickers & Son. See 1776/84/1871.

1871 Fables of John Gay (somewhat altered).  John Benson Rose; Hardbouond.  London:  William Clowes & Sons.  $41.96 from Kenny Parolini, Vineland, NJ, August, '22.

1871 La Fontaine. fables choisies pour les enfants. LaFontaine. Illustrées par M. B. de Monvel. Paris: Librairie Plon. $68 from William Hale, Georgetown, Aug., '91. Extra for $30 from Lien, St. Paul, March, '99.

At last I have a very good copy of this simply wonderful book! The illustrations' colors are delightful. The best of them may be FM and WC. Boutet de Monvel is rightly highly praised by Arbuthnot and Sutherland. The publisher's name is lacking on the title page of these copies. On the cover one finds "Librairie Plon/Rue Garancière 10 a Paris." See "1871/1875?" for an edition that has "E. Plon-Nourrit et Cie Éditeurs/Rue Garancière 10 a Paris" on the cover and "Plon-Nourrit et Cie, Imprimeurs-Editeurs//Rue Garancière 8, Paris" on the title page. These copies are better than those in their colors and are in better condition. There is also now a copy, which I have listed under 1871/1873, which is like this copy in having nothing on the title page but has "Librairie Plon/Rue Garancière 8 a Paris" on the cover. Better equipped bibliographers can help with the time when the bookstore moved and when Nourrit joined with Plon (or Plon got rid of Nourrit?). The Hale copy was originally sold by The Booke Shop in Providence. The Lien copy has a stamp on the inside front cover that reads "Prix 40 fr." followed by a small symbol and "P. 1926 N." It is inscribed by David M. Danials of White Bear, MN.

1871 Select Fables from La Fontaine.  After Elizur Wright.  Illustrations by M.B. de Monvel.  Hardbound.  London/NY:  Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.  $20 from Brattle Books, Boston, June, '16.

1871 Krilof and His Fables. W.R.S. Ralston. Third edition, greatly enlarged. London: Strahan & Co. $65 by mail from Bowie, Seattle, May, '94.

A happy find! This is my most extensive prose Krilof. Of his 201 fables, 148 are here. Many of those not here are reproductions of Aesop and LaFontaine. This edition adds some fifty-five fables to the ninety-three in Ralston's first edition, published in 1869. How many were in the second edition? Many are illustrated, and many have explanatory notes, generally giving a rather specific historical application. Reading through this edition prompted me to put together my set of twenty classic Krilof fables. Further good fables here include the following. "The Brook" (7) criticizes the river, then becomes one, and does just what it had criticized. "The Elephant as Governor" (35) accepts the wolves' clever ruse that they are asking for only one fleece from each sheep! "The Wolves and the Sheep" (57) presents an edict allowing any aggrieved sheep to seize the guilty wolf by the neck and drag him to court! "The Man and His Shadow" (59) is applied to man and the love goddess: he will never catch her when he tries to seize, and he will never get away when she pursues. Some of the best illustrations include "The Miser" (24) and "The Lion, the Chamois, and the Fox" (129). Apparently the Dalziels did some of the engraving, along with an "ABH." I find Krilof really good in only a few fables. One can see the machinery of insight working; the story becomes pedantic. Krilof's politics are dark, even cynical. "Gossip" is a favorite appellation for a friend here.

1871/73? LaFontaine: Fables Choisies Pour les Enfants. LaFontaine. M.B. de Monvel. Hardbound. Paris: Librairie Plon. $20 from Brattle Book Shop, Boston, April, '00.

This book, with nice color work and damaged spine, is best compared with two pairs of books catalogued under "1871" and "1871/75" respectively. Like the "1871" copies, it has no indication of publisher on the title page. Like them, it has "Librairie Plon" stamped in gold on the cover--though in a different typeface--but then this book has "8, Rue Garancière Paris" where those copies have "Rue Garancière 10 a Paris." The front and back covers of this copy show partial sun discoloration along the top and one side. This copy is stamped "1929" on the inside back cover and "7K329" on the face paging the inside back cover. Though no pages are yet loose, the inside spine is weakening. See the other two editions for my comments there.

1871/75? La Fontaine. fables choisies pour les enfants. LaFontaine. M.B. de Monvel. Hardbound. Paris: E. Plon-Nourrit et Cie. $10 from Adobe Bookshop, San Francisco, June, '89. Extra for $35 from Lien, St. Paul, July, '94.

In cataloguing probable first editions of this book, I noticed a difference in both title-pages and covers. The publisher's name is lacking on the title page of those copies, which I have listed under 1871, while both of these copies have "Plon-Nourrit et Cie, Imprimeurs-Éditeurs/Rue Garancière, 8, Paris" on the title page. And while those copies have on their cover "Librairie Plon/Rue Garancière 10 a Paris," these have "E. Plon-Nourrit et Cie Éditeurs/Rue Garancière 10 a Paris" on the cover. Notice that therefore in the case of each of these copies the cover and title-page contradict each other! These copies are inferior to those in their colors and paper and are in poorer condition. They also have spine-problems. Because they tend to have different problems, I will keep both in the collection. Better equipped bibliographers can help with the time when the bookstore moved and when Nourrit joined with Plon--or did Plon get rid of Nourrit?

1871/83 Krilof and His Fables. W.R.S. Ralston. Fourth edition. London: Cassell. $20.06 from Meandaur, June, '93.

This book seems almost identical with the third edition from Strahan in 1871. The publisher, cover, binding, and preface have changed. The wording of the latter will provide plenty of comparative fun for book snoops: Ralston got picky about words twelve years later! The illustrations are even sharper in this edition. I have just noticed the excellent illustration for "Canine Friendship" (79). Gilt edges. See my comments under the 1871 listing.

1871/90? Select Fables from La Fontaine. Adapted from the Translation of Elizur Wright for the Use of the Young. Illustrated by M.B. de Monvel. London/NY: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. $35 from Dan Behnke, Dec., '93. Extra copy in poor condition for $15 from Brattle, Dec., '89.

I had not been aware that there was a classic Monvel in English. A real find! Hobbs (108) tells the story that Crane had submitted a fable book to the SPCK, which rejected it and created this import.

1871/1980 fables choisies pour les enfants. LaFontaine. Illustrées par M.B. de Monvel. Faithful reproduction of a kids' book from the 1870's. Dust jacket. Paris: l'école des loisirs. Gift of Kathryn Thomas, Spring, '92. Extra copy for $18 in Evanston, Spring, '86.

A really classy book, almost worth what I paid for it. I am not sure that any of its pages is apt for a slide, especially since the very small text is always included. Both the original and the copy are very well done. Even the T of C includes pictures!

1871/2010 The Christian Aesop: Ancient Fables Teaching Eternal Truths. W(illiam) H(enry) Anderdon. Paperbound. London/LaVergne, TN: Burns, Oates, and Company/Kessinger. $19.18 from Buy.com through eBay, August, '10.

This book is a delightful find that I just looked at in a Kripke Conference paper. For each of fifty fables, Anderdon adds to the usual narrative and illustration a short spiritual teaching and scripture quotation. Then a several-page instruction in several parts breaks up the teaching into sections. The big surprise to me has been that Anderdon not only became a Roman Catholic before he wrote this book. He became a Jesuit a year after he published it! I would not be surprised if further examination revealed that the Spiritual Exercises are a serious part of the book's structure. I examined a selection of fables in my paper to see about the marriage of fable and spirituality. In FC (66), the match between fable and spirituality works well. In "The Carter Praying" (38), Anderdon has the man working hard first and then praying. Does not the fable usually presuppose that the man has not yet tried working? To highlight the need for prayer and penitence, LM (42) starts with the lion roaming the forest and falling into a trap. The fable's usual point that little friends can be big friends is lost. Still dealing with confession, Fr. Anderdon reaches for an image of the pain we should feel over sins remembered. He comes up with the pain the bear experienced when he stole honey from the bees. But this fable is almost always told with a laugh: "Look at the come-uppance the bear got when he tried to steal honey!" Is that the tone Fr. Anderdon wants for Christian compunction? Anderdon stresses that prayer and especially sacraments can bring the soul closer to God. For that he finds a good image in the turtle carried aloft by an eagle (54). But this fable almost always has the eagle dropping the turtle for having made his impertinent request! This fable's illustration is well chosen, since it comes from the early and not the late part of the usual fable. I think that this noble effort to bring together standard cultural symbols and religion is a matter of hit-and-miss. Anderdon's experience will keep me wary as I use fables in presenting Christian spirituality.

1871/2010 The Christian Aesop: Ancient Fables Teaching Eternal Truths. W(illiam) H(enry) Anderdon. Hardbound. London/Roseburg, OR: Burns, Oates, and Company/Premier Books. $28.51 from Premier Books, Roseburg, OR, August, '11.

Here is the hardbound version of the print-upon-order paperback I had found a year earlier. This book is a delightful find that I just looked at in a Kripke Conference paper. For each of fifty fables, Anderdon adds to the usual narrative and illustration a short spiritual teaching and scripture quotation. Then a several-page instruction in several parts breaks up the teaching into sections. The big surprise to me has been that Anderdon not only became a Roman Catholic before he wrote this book. He became a Jesuit a year after he published it! I would not be surprised if further examination revealed that the "Spiritual Exercises" are a serious part of the book's structure. I examined a selection of fables in my paper to see about the marriage of fable and spirituality. In FC (66), the match between fable and spirituality works well. In "The Carter Praying" (38), Anderdon has the man working hard first and then praying. Does not the fable usually presuppose that the man has not yet tried working? To highlight the need for prayer and penitence, LM (42) starts with the lion roaming the forest and falling into a trap. The fable's usual point that little friends can be big friends is lost. Still dealing with confession, Fr. Anderdon reaches for an image of the pain we should feel over sins remembered. He comes up with the pain the bear experienced when he stole honey from the bees. But this fable is almost always told with a laugh: "Look at the come-uppance the bear got when he tried to steal honey!" Is that the tone Fr. Anderdon wants for Christian compunction? Anderdon stresses that prayer and especially sacraments can bring the soul closer to God. For that he finds a good image in the turtle carried aloft by an eagle (54). But this fable almost always has the eagle dropping the turtle for having made his impertinent request! This fable's illustration is well chosen, since it comes from the early and not the late part of the usual fable. I think that this noble effort to bring together standard cultural symbols and religion is a matter of hit-and-miss. Anderdon's experience will keep me wary as I use fables in presenting Christian spirituality. 

1872 Fables and Legends of Many Countries Rendered in Rhyme. By John Godfrey Saxe. Hardbound. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company. $35 from Goodridge Books, Halesite, NY, through abe, Nov., '04.

I first became acquainted with Saxe through the two versions I found of his "The Blind Men and the Elephant." Here Saxe labels each work by its genre. This collection contains ten stories labeled fables or apologues. "The Wind and the Rose" (10) is new to me and a good fable: the wind keeps trying to make things better for the "poor" rose, who has been doing quite well on her own. The wind ends up uprooting the rose and reducing her to a "paltry stem." "The Brahmin's Air-Castle" (23) is like MM and even refers to it in the moral. "Reason and Vanity" (26) urges using vanity as motivation when reason fails to move a person. A bee stings the vain Chloe on the lip. He is caught and about to be killed when he pleads--successfully--that he had mistaken her lip for a rose. "How It Happened" (32) makes sense at last for me of the traditional fable about human ages taken from animals. Ass, dog, and ape appear before "Dame Nature." Each asks for a reduction in the natural span of years, and each receives it. Man asks for more than his allotted thirty years and receives their reduced allotment besides. So man lives first his natural thirty years. Then he works for eighteen years like an ass. For the next twelve he lives like the dog, "the jest of every scorner." Finally he lives out the ape's years, "a chattering imbecile" and "a theme for childish laughter." "The Merchant" (62) dramatizes the human tendency to impute our blessings to ourselves but our blunders to Fate. "The Force of Example" (66) is the traditional fable of the mother crab and daughter going sideways, but the characters are transposed into lobsters going backwards. "The Two Wallets" (70) is well done. "The Spell of Circe" (105) follows La Fontaine's "The Companions of Ulysses." "King Pyrrhus and his Counsellor" (112) pictures Pyrrhus laying out his dreams of one conquest after another, to climax finally in a leisurely life of pleasure. The counsellor then recommends that Pyrrhus skip straight to the last phase: "seize the passing joy, unvext/With anxious care about the next!" "The Farmer Who Made His Own Weather" (115) follows La Fontaine in urging that we take the weather that God gives us. I realized as I finished the book that "The Blind Men and the Elephant" is not here! Originally sold by W.B. Clarke & Carruth in Boston.

1872 Fables de la Fontaine.  K. Girardet.  Hardbound.  Tours: Alfred Mame et Fils.  $30 from Valley of Ashes Antiques, St. Louis, MO,  through Ebay, Dec., '20.

1872 Fables de La Fontaine en Vers Provençaux.  Marius Bourrelly, translator.  Paperbound.  Marseille: Bibliothèque Provençale:  Alexandre Gueidon.  $29.06 from Biblioteca di Babele, Italy, through Biblio, Jan., '20.

1872 Fables for Little Folks.  LEAL.  Hardbound.  NY: De Witt C. Lent & Co.  $6.99 from Jared P. Douglas, Waynesboro, PA, through Ebay, July, '19.

1872 Gesta Romanorum. Or Entertaining Moral Stories. Volume I of II. Translated by Rev. Charles Swan. New edition with an introduction by Thomas Wright. NY: J.W. Bouton. $10 from Kelmscott, Nov., '91.

See my 1959 reprint of the 1876 edition for extensive comments. Comparison of the two editions might be instructive. This first volume contains eighty stories. T of C. Long set of notes on 281-388. Strongly Aesopic: "Do Not Drive Away the Flies" (#51); "The Blind and the Lame" (#71); "The Donkey and the Lapdog" (#79). #28 has appeared among Aesopic tales. 311-34 are a long excursus (apropos of Ch. XV on St. Alexis) on the converted life of St. Ignatius of Loyola, which makes him out to be a calculating and cynical politician.

1872 Le Pantcha-Tantra ou les cinq ruses: fables du Brahme Vichnou-Sarma; Aventures de Paramarta et Autres Contes.  Traduits par M. l'Abbé J.-A. Dubois.  Illustré de 13 eaux-fortes par M. Léonce Petit.  Hardbound.  Paris: Fables et Contes Indiens: A. Barraud.  $18.75 from Second Story Books Auction Sales, Rockville, MD, May, '18.

1872 Les Faufes dè J. Lafontaine in Patoès d'Charleroèt. Pa Léon Bernus. Hardbound. Charleroi, Belgium: Imprimerie et Lithographie Aug. Piette. €19.83 from Regine Grandchamps, Charleroi, Belgium, Sept., '01.

The author offers this book as a specimen of the patois of Charleroi, a French city in Belgium. There seem to be here one-hundred-and-one fables from La Fontaine, rendered into rhyming patois verse. The fables are organized according to La Fontaine's books. Did various kinds of paper go into the making of this book, or are the differences between pages due to some kind of wear? After the 161 pages of fables, there are some 30 pages of other works in the same dialect. The book is stamped on 11 with a personal stamp: "Afred Meunier, Lodelinsart, 1878."

1872 Oeuvres Complète de La Fontaine. Volume 1. M. Louis Moland. Chefs-D'Oeuvre de la Littérature Française 33. Paris: Garnier Frères. $10 at Book Cellar, Bethesda, June, '89.

A beautifully bound volume, containing the first six books of fables. The entire set includes seven volumes. Four illustrations here, unattributed: LaFontaine, 2W, MSA, and TB. There is a massive introductory work on the history of fable up to LaFontaine's time, and a commentary following each book.

1872 Oeuvres Complète de La Fontaine. Volume 2. M. Louis Moland. Chefs-D'Oeuvre de la Littérature Française 34. Paris: Garnier Frères. $10 at Book Cellar, Bethesda, June, '89.

A second beautifully bound volume, containing the last six books of fables and the usual appended works. Four illustrations, unattributed: Madame de la Sabliere, "The Fish and the Flautist," and "Daphnis and Alcimadure" (twice!). There is a lengthy list of maxims and most-cited verses (461-99) and an AI of the fables (501-7).

1872 Reynard the Fox: A Burlesque Poem From the German Original of the Fifteenth Century. E.W. Holloway? (Illustrations from Kaulbach NA.) Hardbound. Boston: Lee and Shepard/NY: Lee, Shepard, & Dillingham. $8 from Amaranth, Chicago, Dec., ‘97.

The introduction to the Heritage Press edition The Story of Reynard the Fox (1954) speaks of E.W. Holloway's "Reynard the Fox, a Poem in twelve Cantos" as having been published in London in 1852. The mention of "twelve cantos" makes me think that this is a later printing of that Holloway translation. The illustrations are taken straight from Kaulbach. The preface is signed "VD." The paper used in this book may be the most brittle I have seen. The preface speaks of the author's restructuring of the text to contain four parts, each containing three cantos. The whole verse epic here is set in England. For me the source of this work is not clear. I think it does not spring from Goethe but rather from the Lübeck "Reynke de Vos" published in 1498.

1872 The Fables of Pilpay. Revised edition. NY: Hurd and Houghton/Cambridge: Riverside Press. $10 from Jason Smith, Chicago, May, '95.

A good preface sketches the text's history. Apparently, Knatchbull's English came out in 1819. This edition revises one that came out under anonymous authorship in 1818. The book follows a rhythm of one illustration per fable, and adds some end-decorations. I find the illustrations small but engaging. Did the publisher color the engaging title-page illustration of a seated man writing? Kalila (female) and Damna (male) are married to each other. The fox substitutes for the jackal throughout. Damna here starts out at least as an upright though ambitious character. He handles beginning negotiations for getting the lion and bull to meet without pushing himself forward. But when Cohotorbe the bull becomes the lion's closest friend, jealousy takes over in Damna. This version does not offer much development of emotional struggles and depths, e.g., in the lion's learning from Damna of Cohotorbe's alleged betrayals (99). Many fables here are differently told from what I am used to. There are many new fables, e.g., II 18: "The Hunter, the Fox, and the Leopard." Dramatic moments, like the battle of the lion and bull (129), are rendered very quickly--too quickly, I would say. The division into five chapters is completely this author's. There is a double T of C, general and by fable. Pencilled remarks on the title and colophon pages. See 1910? for the Chandos reprint of this work.

1872 The Word-Picture Fable Book, or Old Aesop in a New Dress. Hardbound. Uncle William Series? London: T. Nelson and Sons. $67.50 from Columbia Basin Books, Monmouth, OR, Sept., '01.

One first encounters here a lovely colored pasted-on illustration of FG on the cloth cover. Inside are twenty-two fables offered in rebus form. Beginning on 75 there is a "key," a collection of standard tellings of the fables, with some small black-and-white illustrations. The page format in both sections is unusual in that there is a border around the text giving four aphorisms per page. The book is in good condition. Though the frontispiece's TH is from Weir, many of the smaller illustrations in the key seem to come from William Small.

1872/97 Neue Fibel oder Erstes Lesebuch für die deutschen katholischen Schulen in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nord-Amerika. Bearbeitet von mehreren Priestern und Lehrern. NY: Benziger Brothers. $2 at Victoria's Treasures & Tea Room, Breda, Iowa, Sept., '95.

This book received plenty of use! Many pages are torn; 9-10 and 23-24 are missing. Among the "Lesestücke" is "Das Bienchen und die Taube" in verse (#14 on 56). There is a page each of advertisements for Benziger German and English titles at the back. The title page describes Benziger as "Typographen des heil. Apostolischen Stuhles."

1873 Aesop's Fables. A New Edition, edited by Edward Garrett. With One Hundred Illustrations by J. Wolf, J.B. Zwecker, and T. Dalziel. Hardbound. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. $9.99 from Rachel Groupp, Hampstead, MD, through eBay, Feb., '03.

This little book in only fair condition seems to reproduce the 1873 version published by Strahan. Like that earlier version from a different publisher, this little book has a green-and-gold embossed cover. The plates are identical with those in the Lippincott edition of 1892, but that edition adds huge margins. The best illustrations are of the horse and the lion (75), the fox and the goat (81), DLS (97), WC (108), the eagle and the crow (119), and the fox and the mask (147). There are advertisements at the end. Pages 87-94 are badly shaken.

1873 Aesop's Fables Illustrated. The People's Edition. NY: Samuel R. Wells. (Engravings designed by Tenniel, not acknowledged here.) See 1870/73.

1873 Der deutsch-amerikanische Lesechüler. Die zweiten Anschauungs-, Lese- und Rechtschreibe-Übungen in kurzen, bewährten, poetischen und prosaischen Lesestücken methodisch und streng stufenweise bearbeitet. Herausgegeben für die Schulen in Nordamerika von Conrad Witter. St. Louis: Verlag der Conrad Witter'schen Schulbuchhandlung. $5 at Book Miser, Baltimore, May, '92.

A little treasure. One knows that we are travelling back in history when a two-cent piece appears facing the front end-paper! Pages 18-27 constitute a "Fables and Similes" section. First there are little warm-up conversations including animals, first in rhymed verse and then in prose. Soon we touch on Aesopic material: #55 on 20, followed by #113-114, 116-118, 124-5, and 129-30. (#129 suddenly moves to Roman rather than Gothic characters). There are some dramatic, if simple, illustrations. Note for example the wolf attacking the lying shepherd's sheep on 51. Some pencilling.

1873 Fables de La Fontaine, Tome 1. Jean de La Fontaine. Ornée de douze dessins originaux. Introduction par Ernest Saint-René-Taillandier. Limited edition of 750 copies, signed "Exemplaire de l'Editeur" by Jouaust. Paperbound. Paris: D(amase) Jouaust: Libraire des Bibliophiles. $35 from Donna Moreau, NY, NY through eBay, April, '12.

This is a terrific find! I am saddened only that it is the first volume of two. Now I need to find the other! I have several other things by Jouaust and so I presumed that I had this important edition. Part of the luck here is to get the editor's own signed copy. This is a large (7¼" x9¾") unbound book. The spine has deteriorated, and so has the cellophane dust-cover. This is the "Edition dite des douze painteurs," as both Bodemann (#349) and a penciled note on that cellophane cover indicate. There is a frontispiece portrait of La Fontaine and an engraving before every book, each by a different artist and each protected by a slipsheet. There is also a vignette before the first and after the last fable of each book. Among the best work, in my opinion, are the face of Aesop at the beginning of "La Vie d'Ésope" (13); CW at the beginning of Book II; the endpiece of Book III showing the hanging cat and the rats (138); "The Stag Eating the Vine" by Karl Bodmer (before Book V); and "The Young Widow" (before Book VI). The other full-page illustrations are of OR; MSA; and "The Shepherd and the Sea."

1873 Fables de La Fontaine, Tome 1.  Jean de La Fontaine.  Ornée de douze dessins originaux.  Ernest Saint-René-Taillandier.  Limited edition of 750 copies.  Paperbound.  Paris: D(amase) Jouaust: Libraire des Bibliophiles.  $100 from E.M. Maurice Books, LLC, Litchfield CT, Sept., '15. 

1873 Fables de La Fontaine, Tome 2.  Ornée de douze dessins originaux.  Ernest Saint-René-Taillandier.  Limited edition of 750 copies.  Paperbound.  Paris: D(amase) Jouaust: Libraire des Bibliophiles.  $100 from E.M. Maurice Books, LLC, Litchfield CT, Sept., '15.  

1873 The Third Reader. E.A. Sheldon. Hardbound. Printed in Boston. NY: Scribner, Armstrong & Company. $25 from Magus Books, Seattle, July, '01.

I find five fables in this standard school reader. The star of the group is MSA (113) with six good black-and-white illustrations. Other fables include FM (22), "The Two Goats" (81), "Two Other Goats" (83), and "Selfishness and Unselfishness" (218). "Two Other Goats" reverses the selfishness of "The Two Goats"; it includes an illustration of one goat climbing over the other on the narrow bridge. This book was inscribed in 1878. Do not confuse this work from Scribner's, edited by E.A. Sheldon, with works from the Omaha-based publishing firm named Sheldon and Company.

1873/1904 Drittes Lesebuch für die deutschen katholischen Schulen in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nord-Amerika. Bearbeitet von mehreren Priestern und Lehrern. NY: Benziger Brothers. $3, Oct., '91.

A hefty mix of seasons, plants, animals, religion, American history, and German grammar with seven fables thrown in along the way. The foreword proudly proclaims "no changes" from the texts of the previous edition. Different: the mouse fears the lion and then gets to playing around on him (38). There is a long Kalila and Dimna story of the flock, the mouse, and the turtle (205). See 1909 for the Zweites Lesebuch in the next edition.

1873? Aesop's Fables. Text based chiefly upon Croxall, La Fontaine, and L'Estrange. Revised and Rewritten by J.B. Rundell. Illustrated by Ernest Griset. Second edition. Hardbound. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin. $59 from Erik Bluhm, Los Angeles, through eBay, Sept., '03. 

That this is a second edition, as the title-page proclaims, seems clear. The book has the same format, cover design, pagination as the first edition, done perhaps in 1869. See my comments there. The cloth cover has changed here from green to blue, but the gold embossing is the same. The good copy here is inscribed in November, 1873. Both of its covers are detached, and its spine is missing.

1873? Aesop's Fables. Text based chiefly upon Croxall, La Fontaine, and L'Estrange. Revised and Rewritten by J.B. Rundell.. Illustrated by Ernest Griset. Second edition. Hardbound. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin. $2.25 from Legacies Old and New, Little Egg Harbor, NJ, through eBay, Jan., '04.

This is a second and poorer copy of the second edition. Like the better copy, this book has the same format, cover design, pagination as the first edition, done perhaps in 1869. See my comments there. The cloth cover in both of these second edition copies has changed from green to blue, but the gold embossing is the same. The covers of the good copy are detached, and its spine is missing. This second copy, which I will keep in the collection because its covers and spine are intact, is missing a number of pages along the way. At $2.25, it was worth the price! 

1873? Aesop's Fables. Text based chiefly upon Croxall, La Fontaine, and L'Estrange. Revised and Rewritten by J.B. Rundell. Illustrated by Ernest Griset. Second edition. Hardbound. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin. $50 from Dayna Breed, Hillsboro, NH, through eBay, Nov., '10.

This is my third and perhaps best copy of the second edition of this lovely book. Its first distinguishing mark is its unusual cover, which marks it off not only from my other two second editions but also from my first edition, listed under "1869?" This cover has gold embossed images of FS and DS on brown cloth. See my comments on the texts and illustrations of the first edition. The spine is missing, both covers are separated but present, and some pages are starting to pull away. But the illustrations are wonderfully preserved and there is utterly no foxing. 

1873? Original Fables. By Mrs. Prosser (Eleanor B.). Profusely Illustrated by Ernest Griset, Harrison Weir, Noel Humphreys, and other eminent Artists. Hardbound. London: The Religious Tract Society. £3 from Andrew Burns, Edinburgh, through eBay, April, '04. 

I wonder if I can dare believe that this is a first edition. It has no date. It is inscribed "1873" on the first page. I was lucky to get the book in any case for a rather small bid on eBay. "Mrs. Prosser" is not in Bodemann. My favorite private collector has one copy of Mrs. Prosser, and that is dated to 1878 and is also from the Religious Tract Society. I count two hundred twenty-one "items" in this book. I have read five or six. They remind me of the poorest in the Aesopic collections. That is, they are either belabored or transparent. I did not find among them one where I would say, as I sometimes say with Aesop's, "Now there is a story worth remembering!" I can find nothing in Fabula Docet, Hobbs, Quinnam, McKendry, or Snodgrass. One on-line source seems to indicate that there might have been a first edition of this book in 1870.

1874 Aesop's Fables: A New Version Chiefly from the Original Sources. By Thomas James. With more than one hundred illustrations Designed by Tenniel and Wolf. Sixty-eighth thousand. London: John Murray. Blue cloth cover.  List of illustrations before title-page.See 1867/74.

1874 Aesop's Fables: A New Version Chiefly from the Original Sources.  By Thomas James.  With more than one hundred illustrations designed by Tenniel and Wolf.  Sixty-eighth Thousand.  Hardbound.  Marbled boards cover.  London: John Murray.  See 1867/74.

1874 Fables de Florian suivie de Son Théatre.  Observations littéraires par M. Sainte-Beuve.  Vignettes par Grandville.  Précédées d'un Jugement par la Harpe.  Hardbound.  Paris: Garnier Frères, Libraires-Éditeurs.  €28 from Livraria sa da Costa, Lisbon, July, '24.

1874 Fables de la Fontaine. LaFontaine. K. Girardet. Hardbound. Tours: Alfred Mame et Fils. £4.90 from Henderson, Midlothian, Scotland, through eBay, May, '06. 

This seems to be the earliest Girardet edition I have published by Mame. The edition seems to have begun in 1857 and to have been reprinted with a few corrections in 1860. Bodemann's next edition in this item is 1878. This copy would fit before that edition. It is a fine copy, with excellent illustrations. Picture after picture shows fine detail, though all are unfortunately small. Were all of these editions small like this one (almost 4" x 5¾)? The book is inscribed in 1875. The page-edges are gilt.

1874 Fables in Song. By Robert Lord Lytton (alias Owen Meredith?). No illustrations. Boston: James R. Osgood and Co. $2, Summer, '89.

"Song" here is poetry, and I am not sure what "Fables" is, but it is not our sense. A random sampling finds this poetry tedious. There is nothing Aesopic that I can find here. The good copy was originally sold by a druggist-bookseller in Lansing, Iowa!

1874 Fables in Song. Robert Lord Lytton (alias Owen Meredith?). Hardbound. Boston: James R. Osgood and Co. $3.14 from Ralph Casperson, Niles, IL, May, '95.

I already have a copy of this book, found in 1989. This copy adds a final page of advertisements for Meredith's works after the last page of poetry. As I mentioned a propos of the other copy, "song" here is poetry, and I am not sure what "fables" is, but it is not our sense. A random sampling finds this poetry tedious. There is nothing Aesopic that I can find here.

1874 Spanish Fables.  Margaret R. Cresswell.  Hardbound.  London: J.T. Hayes.  $40 from jarmac17 through Ebay, May, '22.

1874 Trésor de Contes et Fables pour les Enfants.  Jean Gambs.  Various illustrators.  Hardbound.  Leipzig and Berlin: L'École de la Sagesse: Librairie de Otto Spamer.  €12 from Antiquariat Locker, Vienna, through ABE, May, '20.

1874 Trésor de Contes et Fables pour les Enfants.  Jean Gambs.  Various.illustrators.  Hardbound.  Leipzig and Berlin: L'École de la Sagesse: Otto Spamer.  €48 from Antiquariat Krikl, Vienna, through ZVAB, Oct., '21.

1874/1949 Fables de La Fontaine. Suivies d'un choix de fables tirées des meilleurs fabulistes français. Édition classique. Par M. l'Abbé O. Meurisse. Thirty-fifth edition. Paris: J. De Gigord. $2, Summer, '89.

Any book in its thirty-fifth edition has to be a winner! Good short notes in French with the texts. Many fables of Florian, and a few each from seven other fabulists. Some ink spots.

1874? Aesop's Fables in Words of One Syllable. Mary Godolphin. Hardbound. NY: James Miller. $50 from Thorn Books, Moorpark, CA, Jan., '98.

This book seems to fit in between my 1869 first edition and the later book I have listed under "1879?" from the same publisher. It is larger like the later book, and Miller's address is as in the later book. The book is covered in green cloth with gold embossing as on the other two copies. The order of illustrations is as in the original, but two have moved slightly. "The Squeak of a Pig" is now on 22, and "The Hog, Ox, Cow, Dog, and Sheep" is now on 140. As in the later edition, there are no advertisements at the end. See my comments on both of those editions. There is a bookplate from Ril T. Baker of Greenville, Ohio. There is some staining in the book.

1874? Aesop's Fables. New and Enlarged Edition. Text based chiefly upon Croxall, La Fontaine, and L'Estrange. Illustrated by Ernest Griset. Hardbound. London, Paris & NY: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin. $155 from Alibris, March, '01.

I think I have here the key link from which so many editions spread. This is, I believe, the first edition of the enlarged book that worked off of Rundell and Griset's edition of "1869?" See my comments there. This copy seems to be identical with what Bodemann describes as #344.2. By comparison with that earlier copy, this one removes from the title-page the red ink from the title and publisher; "Revised and Re-written by J.B. Rundell"; and a New York address. It adds on the title-page both a reference to Paris and "New and Enlarged Edition." The list of illustrations is still contained within two pages (vii-viii) but includes 66 new illustrations, including "Finis." That book had stopped dead at the bottom of 240 with an image of a chysalis under the fable "The Ant and the Chrysalis." The following page began the AI. This book moves immediately to "The Bee and the Fly" on 241 and continues with texts and illustrations through to 416, which includes the "Finis" illustration. On the facing page, 416, the AI starts. The illustrations are excellent in this copy! Bodemann mentions that there are 132 added prose and verse fables. After so many reproductions and partial presentations, I have worked my way back to the source! This copy is inscribed at Christmas, 1887.

1874? Fables de J. de la Fontaine. Illustrées d'un Cent-et-Vingt Gravures par J. Desandré et W.H. Freeman. Avec des notes et une préface par Décembre-Alonnier. Printed in France, bound in Soho. London: George Routledge and Son. $22 from Barbara Smith of Northhampton at Cambridge, April, '89.

A magnificent edition of engravings I have in editions of 1870, 1875, and 1885, but they are much better done here on far superior paper. They include twenty further engravings, with the full-page engravings done on different stock. The best of them are II.13 (the stargazer falling into a well) and IX.5 (the schoolmaster).

1875 Aesopiska Fabler fritt berättade efter Binder, LaFontaine, Rundell M. Fl. Illustrationerna af Ernest Griset. Hardbound. Stockholm: Familj-Journalens Boktryckeri-Aktiebolag. $103.95 from The Novel Shoppe, Taylor TX, Nov., '02. 

This book is thinner, older, and less garish than my Esops Fabler of 1895, also from Stockholm. There are separate AI's of fables and of illustrations at the back here. The high quality of the paper makes this 152-page book quite thin. The illustrations come off as very sharp. This is one of the better Griset editions I now have. I have editions for which I have guessed at dates of 1869 and of 1864. They would have predated this book. This is a sturdy treasure!

1875 Fables de J. de la Fontaine. Avec des notes et une préface par Décembre-Alonnier. Illustrées de 100 gravures par J. Desandré et W.-H. Freeman. Paris: Bernardin-Béchet et Fils. $2.40 at Lord Randall, Marshfield, MA, April, '89.

A handy little volume of the complete fables. Good paper. The engravings are nicely done--but most lack sparkle. The best are of the monkey and dolphin (120) and of the miser's hole (135). Identical with the 1870 Urbino edition and with the 1885 edition from Bernardin-Béchet except for the cover (here imprinted Schoenhof and Mueller: Boston), publisher (for the Urbino edition), printer, and date.

1875 Fables de La Fontaine. Réimprimées sur l'édition de 1678-1694 et précédées de recherches sur les fables de la Fontaine par M. Paul LaCroix. Portrait gravé à l'eau-forte par L. Flameng. Tome Premier. Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles. $11.25 from Carl Sandler Berkowitz, April, '95.

One cover is loose and the other is missing. The surprise in this complete edition of the fables lies in the illustrations. There are some fifteen illustrations. The advertised portrait of La Fontaine actually occurs twice (frontispiece and v). Of the remaining thirteen illustrations, six by LeRat are on pliable thin paper. The other seven are by various artists on stiff paper, like the portrait on v. I find it hard to make out their names, and I can find none of these names in Bassy, with the possible exception of Millet. There is a T of C at the end of each volume, preceded by a few pages of notes. I suspect that less than diligent care was expended on finding and reproducing illustrations of La Fontaine's fables.

1875 Fables de La Fontaine. Réimprimées sur l'édition de 1678-1694 et précédées de recherches sur les fables de la Fontaine par M. Paul LaCroix. Portrait gravé à l'eau-forte par L. Flameng. Tome Second. Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles. $11.25 from Carl Sandler Berkowitz, April, '95.

One cover is loose and the other is missing. The surprise in this complete edition of the fables lies in the illustrations. There are some eleven illustrations. The six thin-papered, pliant illustrations, including the frontispiece portrait, are by Le Rat. The five stiff illustrations are by various artists. In these two volumes, each illustration happens during the specific fable it illustrates. Between the pages of notes at the end of the volume and the T of C, there is a glossary and an AI.

1875 "La Fontaine and His Fables."  Albert Rhodes.  J.J. Grandville.  Article from Scribner's Monthly, Volume IX, No. 5., March, 1875:  $5.64 from Legacy Books II, Louisville, KY, through AbeBooks, Nov., '22.

1875 La Fontaine Fables.  Illustrations by Jean Adolphe Valentin Foulquier.  Notice by Jean Joseph Francis Poujoulat.  First edition.  Hardbound.  Tours: Alfred Mame.  €120 from Librairie Giard, Lille, France, July, '22.

1875 Las Fábulas de Esopo con las de Samaniego y de Iriarte. Coleccion ordenada y escogida para Ejercicios de Lectura en Prosa y Verso en las Esquelas Españolas y Americanas. Por D. Florencio Janér. Segunda edicion. Barcelona: Libreria de Juan y Antonio Bastinos. $30 from Turtle Island, Feb., '95.

This little book of 316 fables is fascinating for its selection of fables to include from its three fabulists. As far as I can tell from the prologue, it leaves out some of Aesop's fables as "unsuitable for cultivated ears" and some of Samaniego's that are "purely personal or more dedicated to specific persons." The versions of Samaniego and Iriarte are "preserved as faithfully as possible." Hmm.... There are real questions here! Certainly a charming feature of the book lies in those sixty cases where two texts are presented, e.g., both Aesop's and Samaniego's "The Fox and the Grasshopper" (22). A second look just convinced me that all sixty cases involve this combination. Aesop is always in prose here. This book has belonged at various times to J.C. Cebrian of San Francisco and to the University of California. There is some pencilling around the text.

1875 The Fables of Aesop and Others Translated into Human Nature. Charles H. Bennett. Engraved by Swain. Hardbound. London: Chatto and Windus. $100 from A. Hurley, Oceanside, CA, through eBay, August, '11.

This book surprises me. It is slightly smaller in size than Bennett's original publication by W. Kent in 1857. The surprise to me is that the illustrations, apparently the same size as in the original, are colored. Are they hand-colored by the publisher? To me they seem so. They show quite different coloring patterns from those in my original copy. There are a number of striped and polka-dotted pieces of clothing here! The least like a hand-colored illustration is the title-page, but its coloring scheme here is quite different from the one in my original edition. The cover here is green cloth with the frontispiece -- a man is being tried before a frightening lion judge -- stamped into the front board. The title-page differs here by dropping "Author of 'Shadows" under Bennett's name. Pagination is by the number of the individual fable among the 22. No page, whether of text or illustration, is imprinted on both sides. The paper stock is very heavy. The "s" is no longer shaped like an "f," as it was in the original. Lovely stuff!

1875 The Wolf and the Lamb and Other Fables Illustrated by Stories from Real Life. By Mrs. George Cupples. Harrison Weir. Hardbound. London: T. Nelson and Sons. $15.98 from Better World Books, Nov., '09.

This booklet is close to several others that I have, but Nelson seems to have changed the format slightly. This volume lists one specific title first and then adds "And Other Fables Illustrated by Stories from Real Life" where those others start with "Fables Illustrated by Stories from Real Life" and then add a Roman numeral (e.g. " VII") and a subtitle (e.g., "The Wisdom of Experience"). Like them, this volume has 31 pages and then a blank, and it features seven stories, each with a modern equivalent and a Harrison Weir illustration. Where their covers are yellow and slick in appearance, this volume has a green cloth cover with gilt and two pasted-on pictures. The stories here include "The Wolf and the Lion"; "The Monkey and the Cats"; "The Lion, the Bear, and the Fox"; "The Fox and the Stork"; "The Horse and the Loaded Ass"; and "The Miser and Plutus." In fact, this booklet is Section Two, "Justice and Judgment," of Fables Illustrated by Stories from Real Life. First Series, whereas the other booklets seem to be sections of the second series.

1875? Der neue Aesop: Eine Sammlung Fabeln von Lessing, Lichtwer, Pfeffel, etc.  Mit Illustrationen von Ernest Griset.  Hardbound.  Leipzig: A. H. Payne.  €26.25 from Antiquariat Buchseite, Vienna, through ZVAB, Sept., '18.

1875? Fables of Aesop and Others with Instructive Applications. By Samuel Croxall and Other Moralists. Illustrated by One Hundred and Thirty Engravings. Hardbound. Boston: Lee and Shepard/NY: Charles T. Dillingham. $20 from Clare Leeper, July, '96.

This book is close to three others in the collection: Miller 1865, Allen Brothers 1870, and Miller "1890?". Since it is inscribed in 1879, I have guessed at a date of 1875. It is larger in format than those books, namely 5½" x 7¾". Its pages are much thicker; this book is 1¾" thick. Its spine reads "Aesop's Fables" and "Blue Jacket Series." I cannot find mention of this series elsewhere in the book. This book has a different frontispiece: a hanging cat. Though it is unsigned, the illustration looks to me like the work of Weir. What this book has in common with those includes the same cuts from Croxall's fuller applications. With them, it drops some of the usual Croxall features before the fables, namely the dedication to Halifax and the patriotic preface. There is also a three-page essay "Aesop and His Fables" and a beginning AI. The illustrations are again framed rectangles generally including a corner-cropped image or sometimes an oval. Not all fables are illustrated.

1875? Le Fablier de l'Enfance. Stenographical pamphlet of sixteen pages with two pages missing. No author acknowledged. Engravings are signed "J. Panche." Imp. D. Bardin, à St.-Germain. Gift of Goodspeed's, April, '89.

A charming little booklet which offers a collection of fables in shorthand with illustrations. Six are from LaFontaine. The fox smokes a cigar and the goat a pipe on 13. Are those stenographic squiggles in the stork's vase on 14? The pamphlet closes with a new fable, "L'Enfant et la Stenographie."

1875? The Fables of Aesop [Cover: Warne's Edition of Aesop's Fables]. Translated into English by Samuel Croxall; With new Applications, Morals, &c. by the Rev. Geo. Fyler Townsend. With Eighty Original Illustrations, and Coloured Frontispiece and Vignette [Herrick, NA]. Hardbound. London/NY: National Nursery Library: Frederick Warne and Co./Scribner, Welford, and Armstrong. $32 from Columbia Basin Books, Monmouth, OR, through abe, August, '06.

I have been able to date this book to the period from 1872 to 1878, for it was during that six year period that Scribner's had the title "Scribner, Welford, and Armstrong," which is listed on the first of the title-pages here. This little (about 4½" x 6") book contains one hundred numbered fables on 152 pages. The fable texts come from Croxall. Townsend is apparently the person who wrote new morals and applications to substitute for Croxall's long applications. The illustrations come from Herrick, who seems to be nowhere acknowledged for them. The cover is unusual for its color. It shows the farmer and his son getting ready for harvesting. The same picture appears on the title-page, just across from the colored frontispiece labeled "The Lark and Her Little Ones." The three illustrations have the feel of old transfers. I have the sense that I have run into them before, but I cannot place them. The presence of two title-pages makes the book a little suspect. Scribner's seems to have worked hard to import books. This import may have undergone simple addition rather than substitution. There is an opening T of C.

1875? The Fables of Aesop [Cover: Warne's National Nursery Library]. Translated into English by Samuel Croxall; With new Applications, Morals, &c. by the Rev. Geo. Fyler Townsend. With Eighty Original Illustrations, and Coloured Frontispiece and Vignette [Herrick, NA]. Hardbound. London/NY: Warne's National Nursery Library: Frederick Warne and Co./Scribner, Welford, and Armstrong. £10.99 from John Howe, Rochester, Kent, UK, through eBay, June, '11.

This copy is identical with one exception to a book I found five years ago from Columbia Basin Books. That copy had a cream-background board cover with a title of Warne's Edition of Aesop's Fables. At the top of the cover was "National Nursery Library." This book has brown cloth for its cover and "Warne's National Nursery Library" across the middle of that cover. Above that series name is Aesop's Fables, and below is a nice copy of the illustration for "The Dog and the Ass" from 109. I will repeat my comments on that copy. I have been able to date this book to the period from 1872 to 1878, for it was during that six year period that Scribner's had the title "Scribner, Welford, and Armstrong," which is listed on the first of the title-pages here. This little (about 4½" x 6") book contains one hundred numbered fables on 152 pages. The fable texts come from Croxall. Townsend is apparently the person who wrote new morals and applications to substitute for Croxall's long applications. The illustrations come from Herrick, who seems to be nowhere acknowledged for them. Again the two colored pictures in the book relate to each other. The frontispiece is "The Lark and Her Little Ones" and the title-page features the farmer and his son getting ready for harvesting. Does not the presence of two title-pages make the book a little suspect? Scribner's seems to have worked hard to import books. This import may have undergone simple addition rather than substitution. Scribner is not mentioned on the second title-page. There is an opening T of C.

1875? The Fables of La Fontaine. Translated into English Verse by Walter Thornbury. With 300 Illustrations by Gustave Doré and 100 Etchings by Famous French Etchers. On the binding: "Edition de Luxe." NY and London: Cassell. Volume 1. Some pages uncut. $25 at Goodspeed's, March, '89.

Excellent reprints of fifty of Jean Baptiste Oudry's etchings per volume. Thornbury seems complete, but his translation does not contain "books" and it changes LaFontaine's order slightly.

1875? The Fables of La Fontaine. Translated into English Verse by Walter Thornbury. With 300 Illustrations by Gustave Doré and 100 Etchings by Famous French Etchers. On the binding: "Edition de Luxe." NY and London: Cassell. Volume 2. Some pages uncut. Some slip pages missing. $25 at Goodspeed's, March, '89.

Excellent reprints of fifty of Jean Baptiste Oudry's etchings per volume. Thornbury seems complete, but his translation does not contain "books" and it changes LaFontaine's order slightly.

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1876 A Fable for Critics. By James Russell Lowell. With Vignette Portraits of the Authors de Quibus Fabula Narratur. Boston: The Riverside Press: Houghton, Mifflin and Company. See 1848/76/90/91.

1876 Aesop's Fables in Words of One Syllable by Mary Godolphin. Printed in the Learners' Style of Phonography, or Phonetic Shorthand. By Isaac Pitman. Pamphlet. London: F. Pitman/Bath: Isaac Pitman. $9.99 from Good Buyz Inc., Piqua, OH, through Ebay, August, '00.

This is the earliest of the four different dated Pitman-Godolphin booklets I have found. Here Pitman is at "Phonetic Depot, 20 Paternoster Row" in London. The price will be sixpence all the way through the 1888 editiion. The 48 pages include the title-page, a T of C, and thirty-seven fables.

1876 Fables de La Fontaine.  Hardbound.  Paris: Oeuvres de Jean de La Fontaine:  Chez Delarue, Libraire.  Gift, March, '18.

1876 Fables Mises en Vers par J. de La Fontaine, Tome Premier.  Hardbound.  Paris: Delarue.  $20 from Thrift Books, Goring-by-Sea, through Ebay, August, '17.

1876 Fables Mises en Vers par J. de La Fontaine, Tome Second.  Hardbound.  Paris: Delarue.  $20 from Thrift Books, Goring-by-Sea, through Ebay, August, '17.

1876 Introduction a la Langue Française; ou Fables et Contes Choisis, Anecdotes Instructives, Faits Mémorables, etc. Avec un Dictionnaire de tous les Mots traduits en Anglais. Par Victor de Fivas. Hardbound. London: Lockwood & Co. $9.95 from Sandi Harrison, Trinidad, CO, through Ebay, May, '00.

This edition may be in the competition for the longest title to a moderately sized book! This title is actually a bit misleading. Among the more than fifty offerings, I find only four that are fables: GA, CJ, TMCM, and FC. All are taken verbatim from La Fontaine. The English preface gives a good sense of the niche which the book's author intended it to fill: "…I trust that the general complaint of the want of a first French Reading-Book, suited to youth of both sexes, is now effectually removed." The spine has been hurt somewhere in the last one-hundred-twenty-five years. The price is embossed in the cover: 2/6. Besides an advertisement for a follow-up reader, there are sixteen pages of book advertisements in the back.

1876 Phaedri Augusti Liberti Fabulae Aesopiae. Recognovit et praefatus est Lucianus Mueller. Hardbound. Printed in Leipzig: Teubner. DEM 6 from an unknown source, June, '98.

This is one of the many printings under Number 620 in Carnes' Phaedrus bibliography. Here is Carnes' description: "One of the most successful editions of Phaedrus, a school edition, by Müller (1836-1898), with a short introduction 'De Phaedri vita et scriptis' in three parts: an introduction to Phaedrus, recognition of his debt to the Dressler edition, together with an overview of Phaedrus’ metrics. The third part deals with textual questions and emendations, especially where they differ from Dressler. Grammatical notes and glosses, a much reduced text as compared to Müller’s critical edition (Müller 1877)." I emphasize that there are no comments or elucidations after or beneath the text. It is indeed much reduced when compared with his important Teubner text of one year later. xiv + 66 pages.

1876/79 Young Folks' Readings for Social and Public Entertainment. Edited by Lewis B. Monroe. No illustrations. Inscribed 1886. Boston: Lee and Shepard/NY: Charles T. Dillingham. $3 at Heartwood, Charlottesville, April, '92.

This book was put together after three volumes of Public and Parlor Readings met with success. The readings here are particularly for those ten to sixteen years old. T of C at the beginning. Along with such delights as "Griper Greg" and "Der Baby," we meet four fables. "The Eagle and the Spider" by Krilof (61) is first. J.T. Trowbridge offers a good verse rendition of "The Fox in the Well" (with a wolf, 143). MSA is offered, in a verse version slightly different from the usual, as "A Grecian Fable" (191): the father, not a miller, purchases the ass and finally breaks the silence--without losing anything--at the end of the fable to announce the moral. "The Brahmin and the Tiger" (211) is offered as a "Hindoo story"; in it the fox saves the Brahmin by using the standard ploy of asking the tiger and the Brahmin to repeat the action.

1876/1959 Gesta Romanorum. Or Entertaining Moral Stories. Translated by Rev. Charles Swan. Revised and corrected by Wynnard Hooper. Paperbound. Unabridged and unaltered republication of the Bohn Library Edition of 1876. NY: Dover. $4.50, Spring, '90.

A curious book of 181 stories. Of interest for the history of fable are: the wild Christian applications after the stories; the use of the terms "apologue" and "fable"; and the contemporizing of Socrates, Alexander, and Claudius in one fable (#61). Items of the T of C (called "outlines") on lxviii-lxxvi do not match the actual titles of the individual stories. No index, unfortunately. The introduction and notes are nineteenth-century scholarship at its best and worst. Strongly Aesopic: "Do Not Drive Away the Flies" (#51); "The Blind and the Lame" (#71); "The Donkey and the Lapdog" (#79); AL (#104, but Androcles is a knight turned brigand, and years pass before the story's second phase); "The Serpent and the Man Once Wronged" (#141); and "The Frozen Serpent" (#174). Tales with Aesopic touches or background are #28, 85, 91, and 93.

1876/2010 Fables from Aesop and Myths from Palaephatus with a vocabulary. By John T. White. Paperbound. London/La Vergne, TN: White's Grammar School Texts: Longmans, Green, and Co./Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprints. $25 from Bookhouse, Newton, IA, through eBay, June, '10.

Here is a late nineteenth-century textbook that probably seems curious to us. There are eighteen Aesopic fables in simple Greek prose. Then there are ten mythological stories. After that there is only a vocabulary. Good luck, pupils! I suppose it is a service that Kessinger and others are publishing books like this, but I would rather find the originals in old bookstores! This booklet is iv + 67 pages long.

1876? Funny Little Fables and Stories for My Little Friends (Cover: Fables and Stories). Georgiana C. Clark. Hardbound. London: Dean & Son. £35 from The Little Book Store, Lytham St. Annes, UK, Oct., '11.

This fragile book contains seven chromolithographic plates and a woodcut tail piece. 30 pages, unpaginated. Inscribed in 1896. The text block is coming loose but still holds. The first fable is MSA, told this time as a trip to take some wheat back to the farmer who had sent it. It concludes with the son telling the father that they had better "pay no attention to the silly remarks of strangers." Other fables include FC, "The Cormorant and the Fish" (and the serpent), "The Fox and the Goat," OF, "The Tomtit and the Wagtail," "The Hare and the Frogs," "The Cat and the Two Canaries," and DS. In OF, the frog grew bigger "till he was nearly as big as a Bull." Surprise! In "The Fox and the Goat," the fox once out of the well said that he could give the goat only advice, and his advice is that the goat be patient. "The Hare and the Frogs" is a new version to me of TH. Perhaps the best of the illustrations shows "The Fox and the Goat." There are no other stories than these fables; the title can thus be misleading. The publishers describe themselves on the title-page as "Publishers and Christmas Card Manufacturers." The lithographer is Emrik & Bingen, Haarlem.

1877 Aesop's Fables in Verse. Jane B. Ballantyne. Hardbound. Edinburgh: Andrew Elliot. £20 from Jane and John Kinnaird, Carlisle, England, Feb., '06. 

Here is a curious observation. This book is printed by Ballantyne, Hanson, and Company in Edinburgh and London. Might the author here be a member of the family of the printer? As the opening T of C shows, there is a fable per page from 9 through 167. The only illustrations are small printer's devices on the title-page and the last page of the T of C. Each text seems to contain twelve lines (three rhyming quatrains) of narrative and a rhyming quatrain of moral. Both the front endpaper and a back insert note that the book was a gift on Easter Monday of 1909. The book existed for thirty years, apparently, before someone claimed it! Not in Bodemann. I tried the first few fables and found them rather standard.

1877 Fables de La Fontaine. LaFontaine. Illustrations de Grandville reportées sur bois par A. Desperet, gravées par Brend'Amour. Hardbound. Tours: Alfred Mame et Fils. $50 from (more) Moe's, Berkeley, Dec., '00.

Here is a reprinting of the lovely book I had found from Mame that was published in 1870. This book has a fine gold-embossed red cloth cover. Though the spine is cracked, the interior is in very good condition. As I mentioned in my comment there, it takes a close look at these 240 illustrations to see how the wood-engraver departs from Grandville. AI at the back. Inscribed in 1893. Ex libris Julius Liebmann.

1877 Fables de J. de la Fontaine. Décembre-Alonnier. Illustrées de 100 gravures par J. Desandré et W.H. Freeman. Hardbound. Paris: Bernardin-Béchet. $19.75 from greenladystreasure, through eBay, June, '15.

1877 Oeuvres Complete de La Fontaine.  La Fontaine/M. Louis Moland.  Vignettes en Taille-Douce, gravées par les Meilleur Artistes d'apres les Dessins de Staal.  Hardbound.  Paris:  Garnier Frères.  $80 from Black Swan, Oakland, July, '15.  

1877 Phaedri Fabularum Aesopiarum Libri Quinque. Emendavit Adnotavit Supplevit Lucianus Mueller. Leipzig: Teubner. $15 from Straat in Amsterdam, Dec., '88.

What is there to say about a nicely put together Teubner text? Schön!

1877 The Kingdom of Mother Goose. By Mrs. G.N. Bordman. Paperbound. Melrose, MA. $25 from Ahab Rare Books, Cambridge, MA, April, '05. 

The subtitle of this forty-eight page pamphlet is "A New Fairy Play for Vestry and School Entertainments with Appropriate and Easy Music for Young Voices. Also Original Recitations, Music, Motion Songs, &c., for School Exhibitions." Whew! I picked it up because it includes "The Rabbit and Turtle" in verse of indifferent quality on 43-44. This rabbit declares "This poor snail gives me time for a nap,/So I will improve it by snoring." The moral is "You can't always tell,/What comes of persistently trying." Many of the pamphlet's songs have detailed directions on the motions that are to accompany each line. To judge from the back cover, the authoress is quite a producer of original penny songs for public schools.

1877 Über eine noch nicht edirte Sammlung äsopischer Fabeln, nach einer Wiener Handschrift: Wissenschaftliche Beilage zum Jahresbericht des Gymnasium zu St.Elisabet zu Breslau, einschließlich der Schulnachricht).  Dr. Fedde.  Paperbound.  Breslau: Gymnasium zu St.Elisabet zu Breslau.  €12 from Antiquariat Deinbacher (Murstetten, Austria) through ZVAB, Sept., '19.

1877 Woodland Romances; or, Fables and Fancies.  C[lara]. L. Mateaux.  Hardbound.  London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin.  £13.99 from World Of Rare Books, Goring-by-sea, West Sussex, UK, May, '14.  

1877/77? Fables de La Fontaine. Par Lambert Sauveur. Deuxième édition. NY: Henry Holt and Company/F.W. Christern/Boston: Schoenhof and Moeller. $7.50 from Brattle Book Shop, Nov, '97.

This is a straightforward text of 57 of La Fontaine's fables with commentary before and notes after each fable. The book then adds thirteen fables without comment or notes. It is unusual to see an American firm publish a book in French! This book originally cost $1.50.

1877? Lafontaine's Fabeln, Volume I.  Translated by Ernst Dohm.  Illustrated by Gustave Doré.  Hardbound.  Berlin: W. Moeser Hofbuchhandlung.  €75 from Antiquariat Canicio, Heidelberg, July, '23.

1877? Lafontaine's Fabeln, Volume 2.  Translated by Ernst Dohm.  Illustrations by Gustave Doré.  Hardbound.  Berlin: W. Moeser Hofbuchhandlung.  €75 from Antiquariat Canicio, Heidelberg, July, '23.

1878 Aesop's Fables. With text based chiefly upon Croxall, La Fontaine, and L'Estrange. Revised and Rewritten by J.B. Rundell. Illustrated by Ernest Griset. Hardbound. Boston/NY: Boston: Lee and Shepard/NY: Charles T. Dillingham. $120 from Alibris, Jan., '00.

This book seems exactly identical, except for its cover, with the 1882 printing. As I note there, this printing is among the more serious Griset editions. It is also one of the few that names Rundell; others give only "J.B.R." after the editor's preface or nothing at all. This expensive edition in good condition has the 266 original Rundell fables, the editor's preface, a list of illustrations, the ninety-three illustrations, and a closing AI. The page-edges are gilt all the way around. The striking cover puts together a golden water-spirit extending a golden axe to a frightened woodman; the title is intertwined with the trees and their branches. The illustration can be seen in reverse on 93.

1878 Aesop's Fables. With text based chiefly upon Croxall, La Fontaine, and L'Estrange. Revised and Rewritten by J.B. Rundell. Illustrated by Ernest Griset. Hardbound. Boston/NY: Boston: Lee and Shepard/NY: Charles T. Dillingham. $15.50 from Melinda Reiter, Manhatten Beach, CA, through eBay, May, '11.

This book matches one I found over eleven years ago, with the single exception that it has a green cloth cover rather than the blue cover there. The gold of the god holding an axe on the cover with its red title-lettering stands out all the more! Notice, as in the blue-covered version, how the cover's artist tries to have the trees giving depth to particular parts of the title as some letters partially "hide" behind the trees. I will include comments from that version. This book is again identical, except for its cover, with the 1882 printing. As I note there, this printing is among the more serious Griset editions. It is also one of the few that names Rundell on its title-page; others give only "J.B.R." after the editor's preface or no indication at all of the editor. This edition has the 266 original Rundell fables, the editor's preface, a list of illustrations, the ninety-three illustrations, and a closing AI. The page-edges are gilt all the way around. The cover illustration can be seen in reverse on 93. This copy is in very good condition. 

1878 Bewick's Select Fables of Aesop and Others. In Three Parts: Fables Extracted from Dodsley, Fables with Reflections in Prose and Verse, Fables in Verse. Writer not acknowledged, perhaps Goldsmith. Faithfully reprinted from the Rare Newcastle Edition published by T. Saint in 1784. Wood Engravings by Thomas Bewick. London: Longmans, Green. See 1776/84/1878.

1878 Fables by G. Washington Aesop. [Outside and inside cover: "Out of the World"]. Taken "Anywhere, anywhere, out of The World." Writer not acknowledged: George T. Lanigan of The World of NY. Illustrated by F.S. Church. Black cover, with damaged cartoon cover inside. Lower corner of pages slightly water damaged. NY: The World. $12.50 at Goodspeed's, March, '89. Extra copy with lost covers for $38 from Serendipity, Berkeley, Feb., '97.

A very funny little book, most like Bierce in its sardonic and surprising treatment of the fables. There is also a touch of Thurber here. The illustrations are delightful, particularly for a cheap little book. The two accounts of the farmer and the snake (23 and 52) are sexist but funny. I like GA on 25. TH, FC, and many other old friends are here.

1878 Fables de la Fontaine, Précédées de la vie d'Ésope. Accompagnées de Notes Nouvelles par D.S.. Illustrations par K. Girardet. Nouvelle Édition dans laquelle on aperçoit d'un coup d'oeil la moralité de la fable. Hardbound. Tours: Alfred Mame et Fils. $10 in exchange with Clare Leeper, July, '96.

It has taken me fifteen years to catalogue this unassuming little book (3¾" x5⅞"). It is in only fair condition. The cover is darkened and has a signature across its top and an ink blotch near its bottom. But it is a lovely little find! As Bodemann #330.3, it represents an important tradition in the publication of La Fontaine's fables in France. I have an 1874 Girardet edition published by Mame. The first edition seems to have been in 1857 and to have been reprinted with a few corrections in 1860. Bodemann's next edition in this chain is this item from 1878. The illustrations seem to have remained the same throughout these editions. The paper shows extensive foxing but the illustrations here are in good condition. They are unfortunately small. Now I need to find a copy of that 1857 first edition, and maybe even of the 1860 second edition. 

1878/1925? Fables by G. Washington Aesop. Cover expands "G." to "George." Writer not acknowledged: George T. Lanigan of The World of NY. Illustrated by F.S. Church. Inscribed in Edinburgh in 1930. London: W. Mack. $15 at Goodspeed's, March, '89. Extra copy with taped, weak spine for $35 at Culpin's, Denver, March, '94.

A British reprint of The World edition? I note several changes from there: the frontispiece reads "The New Aesop." The title page shows Aesop in a robe and turban. After (1) the frontispiece and (2) the title page, there is (3) a picture of a bull reading, (4) a poem, and (5) a picture of an alligator, a dog, and a penguin. "The Merchant of Venice" then begins the fables on 7. After 54, there is a page of Mack ads. Included in this edition but not in my 1878 edition are three fables from Bret Harte (10, 40, 48) and even one falsely attributed to him (28). See The Improved Aesop for Intelligent Modern Children (1946) by Bret Harte, which contains Charles Meeker Kozlay's essay "The Piracy of Bret Harte's Fables."

1879 Aesop's Fables with Vocabulary, Notes, and References to Goodwin's and Hadley's Grammars. T.T. Timayenis. Hardbound. Boston: The Chautauqua Language-Lesson Series: John Allyn. $20 from Brian Mergl, Lake Havasu City, AZ, through eBay, Nov., '10.

"Preceded by Talks on the Natural Method." This is a curious book. First, I am surprised that I have not run into it before, because I have had my eye out for books that use Aesop to teach. This book does exactly that. At the core of the book, from 1 to 108, are 232 Attic prose fables. My first question is naturally "From whom?" and I do not find an answer here. Which edition might the author have followed? The fables are followed by notes and a Greek-English vocabulary. A surprising feature of the book comes just after the preface: a 64-page set of about fifteen Greek dialogues. They seem offhand to be expanded fables. Are these the "Talks on the Natural Method"? At any rate, the book confuses by thus having two different sets of pages 5 to 64. The lack of a T of C hurts at least this reader's efforts to understand what this book offers. I chuckle to read that in 1879 language teachers were enthusiastic about a "new" and "natural" method of learning languages. How many times over has this field of knowledge experienced that turn to the new and natural?

1879 Basni: I.A. Krylova, With a Biography of the Author. Under the editorship of V. Kenevich. With pictures by I.S. Panov. Eighteenth complete edition. Hardbound. St. Petersburg: Publishing House of P.A. Yegorov. $24.99 from Ryan McMillen, Woodstock, VT, through Ebay, April, '00.

The complete text of the fables is followed by a list after 298 of the fables arranged by the years in which they were written (1806-36) and then an alphabetical index. The volume is in fair to poor condition. The cover (cardboard boards) is worn and the spine damaged. There are about thirty-five good illustrations, signed by Panov and "Braun" or something very close to that, presumably the engraver. I do not have many illustrated editions of Krylov. Among the best of the illustrations here are "The Monkey and the Spectacles" (26), FK (37), "Monkey" (83), "The Lion A-Hunting" (133), "The Knight" (155), "Lion and Wolf" (158), "Wolf and Shepherds" (178), "Ass and Rustic" (190), "Lambkin" (210), and "Squirrel" (253). The set of texts seems to fit perfectly with Pares' standard edition. There is a Russian bookseller's label on the inside front cover.

1879 Fables of La Fontaine. With illustrations from designs by J.J. Grandville. Translated from the French by Elizur Wright, Jr. NY: Thomas R. Knox and Co. Inscribed in 1888. $15 at Wordsmith, Lincoln, NE, Dec., '92.

A very curious book. Compare it with my 1841 and 1860 editions of Wright's translation that use Grandville as illustrator. The surprises start when Book I's title page comes before the book's title page! The 240 or so fables are divided into books--not LaFontaine's division, which Wright followed--but they are not numbered. For some reason, "first fable" comes after each book-title page and before the first fable of the book, but there are no similar markings over any further fables. There are small illustrations along the way, most of them simple repeated ornaments. One wonders if these were what the printer happened to have around. Four full-page illustrations are included, and three of these (facing 128, 360, and 426) are at least derived from Grandville. The fourth, for "The Wolf and the Fox" (facing 276), is not Grandville's illustration for this LaFontaine fable (XI.6). There is an AI at the back of the book. My, what one finds!

1879 Fables of La Fontaine. With illustrations from designs by J.J. Grandville. Translated from the French by Elizur Wright, Jr. NY: James Miller. $20 at Holland's, Portland, July, '93.

This book uses the same text plates as that published in the same year by Thomas Knox. This book cleans up some of that book's errors noted in my comments there. It adds many full-page unpaginated illustrations after Grandville, so that the final count of them is about twenty. Several times a reader can note changes from Grandville's conception of given visual scenes (for example, facing 172 and 240). At other times, careful scrutiny shows that the engravings are only "after" Grandville. The title page uses one of the printer's-filler-designs that is repeated several times, as in Knox, on text pages. Like Knox's book, this version has an AI at its back.

1879 Les Fables de La Fontaine Tradute Librement ou Imitées en Vers Provençaux, Tomes I-II.  Hippolyte Laidet.  Hardbound.  Marseille: Marius Lebon.  €80 from Librairie Fauguet, Marseilles, July, '23.

1879 Young Folks' Readings for Social and Public Entertainment. Edited by Lewis B. Monroe. No illustrations. Boston: Lee and Shepard/NY: Charles T. Dillingham. See 1876/79.

1879? Aesop's Fables in Words of One Syllable. By Mary Godolphin. No artist acknowledged. Hardbound. Printed in NY. NY: James Miller. $12 from Second Story Books Warehouse, Bethesda, MD, Jan., '99.

This book largely replicates the first edition of Godolphin's book by James Miller in 1869. See my comments there. Some things have changed. Miller's address has changed from 647 to 799 Broadway. The cover has changed from blue to red/brown, but the gold emboss remains the same, as does the spine. The frontispiece and first illustration exchange places. The illustration for "The Stag in the Lake" is now on 32, not 58. The illustration for FM, on 124 in the first, is missing here. This later book is slightly taller. It has no advertisements in the back. Three people signed the second last page of this book. Several early pages are loose. By the way, what a difference in price I found between these two copies today!

1879? Ausgewählte Fabeln und Erzählungen. Chr. F. Gellert. Mit fünf Abbildungen. Hardbound. Stuttgart: Universalbibliothek für die Jugend: Druck und Verlag von Gebrüder Kröner. DM 10 from ABC, Hamburg, July, '98. 

I am surprised that this little book can accommodate fifty of Gellert's fables. The selection tends to include the same fables used elsewhere. The special gift of this little old volume lies in the five illustrations. They range from over half of the page to a full page. Gellert is not often illustrated, I am finding. Illustrated here are: "Die junge Ente" (frontispiece); "Der Tanzbär" (15); "Das Heupferd oder der Grashüpfer" (27); "Der Affe" (44); and "Das Kutschpferd" (54). T of C at the front. Inscribed in 1880.

1879? One Hundred Picture Fables, With Rhymes. Designs on wood by Otto Speckter, engraved by Brothers Dalziel. Rhymes by F. Hey. NY: George Routledge and Sons. Three versions in the collection: $10 from The Booksmith at Dearborn St. Fair, June, '88; $10 from Second Chance, Omaha, May, '94; $13.50 from The Prince and the Pauper, San Diego, Aug., '93.

Uses the plates from Picture Fables (1858) and even uses its title on the cover. See comments there. Besides the several fables that touch on Aesopic material, there is also a title-page illustration of the "Fox and Mask"--a fable untold in the book! The engravings here come out heavier than in Picture Fables. The translator (Henry W. Dulcken) is no longer mentioned. The first two copies are very similar. The second has a green cover, has new pictures pasted onto it, and adds two books in the series advertised on the page before the preface. The plates for both image and text seem to have deteriorated. The third copy changes the cover (to a green scene of kids reading), the frontispiece (to Ernst Griset's Eskimo version of "The Thief and the Dog"!), and the NY address for the publisher. It is also dirty and worn, and has someone's architectural sketch on the inside back cover.

 

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