Creighton University

This book surprised me on Ebay.  It is a landscape formatted paperbound book 11¾" x 8¼" with thirty of Chardon's eclectic colored paintings having all the right-hand pages of the book, with La Fontaine's texts on the left.  There is a literary piece on the title-page by Daniel Delpeck, and the same page acknowledges photos by Denis Mareau.  Are those photos of Chardon's paintings?  These full-page paintings are loud and eclectic and often, I find, quite engaging.  My top choices here are OF (9); TT (13); "The Crow Imitating the Eagle" (21); TMCM (39); 2P (49); and MSA (61).  I get the impression that Chardon did yet more illustrations of the fables, and that these were chosen from among the larger oeuvre.

The title continues: "Tales of Love and Wisdom for You to Read With Your Child to Enchant, Enlighten, and Inspire."  First published in the USA and UK in 2008 by Duncan Baird.  Twenty stories with lots of introduction and appendix materials.  Some of the Jatakas and other fables are told straight, while others are slightly adapted, and some quite adapted.  There seem to be several stories of monsters and gods transforming themselves into animals.  In TT (32), the turtle calls up to ducks flying by overhead.  He gets the idea to use a stick.  Some children exclaim "Doesn't he look silly!"  When he lands, he says "Ouch!"  Moral: "If you can't say something kind, don’t' speak."  "The Prince and the Sticky Hair" (37) urges us to transform the monster, who, as it turns out, only attacked people to stop them from attacking him.  In "The Grateful Bull" (43), the bull responds to encouragement but not upbraiding.  In "The Quails and the Hunter" (55), the leader has the bright idea before the flock is caught.  They seem to need no rat to undo the net; they simply drop it.  "The Elephant and the Dog" (48) seems to me a good-natured fable: take away a being's friend, and you make him sad.  Return his friend and he will be happy.   New to me and typical of these stories is "The Lion and the Jackal" (121).   The story goes through several phases.  In one, the jackal saves the lion and the two become fast friends.  In another, the lion's wife becomes jealous of the jackal family, but, when confronted, she thinks better and life again becomes peaceful.  The beginning material introduces the Buddha and his teachings, recommendations on how these stories address the needs of children, and even a recommended relaxation exercise for parents to do with children before reading the stories to or with them.  The appended material includes lists of values and suggestions on "gently introducing your child to the Buddhist practice of meditation" (7).

Here is a well crafted and well executed sturdy paperback book.  A well written introduction pays homage to Chuang Tze and the Chinese tradition of "yuyan."  It also mentions Aesop and the Bible.  One curiosity is that the introduction mentions one Aesopic fable by name, "The Farmer and the Snake," but that fable is not included here!  This paperback of 150 pages is cleverly illustrated with full-page colored pictures, one to a fable, though I cannot find acknowledgement of the artist.  I find some 49 fables.  In #2, enemies in a boat help to save it in a crisis.  "Talk Much or Little" (20) notes that people do not listen to frogs who croak all day, but they do listen to roosters that crow only at dawn.  "Roosters" here is actually "roasters," an unintended but lovely pun!  "Birds of a Feather" (67) tells of a man with terrible armpit odor who was shunned by family and neighbors.  Someone met up with him who loved that odor!  "Break Arrows" (109) is BS; it represents the only fable here that is normally included in Aesopic collections.  One of the best illustrations is that for "The Snipe and the Clam" (87).  Both refuse to surrender, and so they are caught together.

Here is a spiral bound student workbook of 99 pages for the “Classical Trivium Core Series.”  The emphasis on “classical” is clear from the beginning “Introduction to the Progymnasmata.”  At the other end of the book, the classical approach is again emphasized in the appendix “Figures of Description,” which could be helpful to anyone wanting to understand ancient terms and teachings on things like rhetoric or composition.  The book features 20 well-chosen fables listed in the opening T of C.  The pedagogical approach here is that students read and imitate fables.  The book asks for good analytical work on plot components like recognition, reversal and suffering.  Students work their way through paraphrases and variations.  I would be curious to learn what the experience has been like for those who have used this approach.

Four of the last five of the ten pop-up stories here are fables. GA; TMCM; TH; and LM.  The paper construction work is good, helped by the stiff cardboard used for pages.  The GA construction has the "saltamontes" leaping over the hard-working ants.  Pages of a telling of the story are reprinted along with other materials.  Here those other materials include: a list of activities appropriate for summer and for winter; a cartoon showing that an ant can lift twenty times its weight; photos of nuts and an apple as food for winter "only for those who work hard"; and other comments around the page.  In TMCM, it seems that both mice end up saying "I love to be in my house."  Their two-page spread includes letters to each other.  The paperwork for TH has the hare springing forward as the page opens, but the tortoise has already just crossed the finish line.  A pennant in the corner proclaims "¡Lenta pero constante gana la carrera!"  My prize goes to LM.  On this page a large tree rises up as the page opens.  The lion is suspended in a net from the tree, and the mouse is at the bottom of it.  Delightful work!

This is a Hebrew translation of the Puffin English original of 1976 about a fox with lots of tricks, exploits, and escapes.  The illustrations make it tempting to see fables behind these stories, including one of fish being thrown off a traveling cart.  Perhaps I will get a chance to check the original to see whether fables really are at work here.  Till then I am unsure.

This is one of two die-cut booklets found by chance at Powell's.  Pedro twice laughs at the workers who respond to his calls for help.  The third time, there really is a wolf.  In a nice touch, the lambs tremble as they sense the presence of the wolf on the scene.  There are two unusually poignant illustrations in this presentation.  The first shows the workers walking in the other direction while Pedro stands frantically shouting for help on top of a cliff.  The second and final illustration shows the wolf with his jaws sunk into a bleeding lamb.  16 pages, stiff covers, adequate color illustrations.  These booklets sat on my shelf for five years waiting to be catalogued.

My mouth waters to see the authors and subjects contained in this report of the second international Menantes-Konferenz in Wandersleben in June of 2009.  In the first of four sections, Reinhard Dithmar, Michael Schilling, and Jan Mohr write on fable tradition; their treatments touch, respectively, on theology, on Steinhöwel, and on Waldis.  Four papers follow on fable theory: Andreas Seidler, Katja Barthel, Peter Hasubek, and Gisbert Ter-Nedden.  Gellert, Lichtwer, and Lessing all get attention in this section.  The third section on European fable touches on Samaniego, Iriarte, and Krasicki and on fables in Hungary and the Netherlands.  The final section on fable perspectives addresses Wilhelm Busch, Lessing, and Max Ernst.  As the beginning T of C points out, there are introductory comments by Bernd Kramer and Dirk Rose.  There are occasional black-and-white illustrations.  I look forward to the rainy day when I can sit down with this book! 

Here is one of some 38 inexpensive Turkish editions of Aesop.  This book is extremely simple: each page from 5 to 40 presents one fable without illustration.  There is a cute quack doctor frog on the colored cover.  The back cover lists other volumes in this series of classics.

Here is one of some 38 inexpensive Turkish editions of Aesop bought together.  This book is extremely simple: each page from 5 to 64 presents one fable without illustration.  The front cover presents a frog looking up at a dragonfly in flight with an insect on its back.  Now, is that an Aesopic fable?  The back cover lists other volumes in this series of classics.

This is a substantial hardbound book of 352 pages with plentiful simple line drawings.  There is an opening T of C.  The front cover features cartoon characters: the moon, a duck, and a fly.  The back cover shows other fable books in the same series.  Most fables are limited to one page and regularly receive a full-page line-drawing.  5½" x 8¼".

The back of this book of graphic short stories -- short stories presented in pictures with short dialogue -- has this short but accurate description: "…incidents dérisoires, broutilles ordinaires, terribles futilités…"  There are about ten of these stories tracing trivial occurrences, especially with a surprising or revealing ending.  A checkout young woman at the supermarket gets constant criticism from a customer, and then we learn that she has just lost her father.  A camel driver lives the hard but vibrant community life of caravans and then comes to the big city with his pole, and his pole turns out to be the broom of a street sweeper.  The post office woman refuses to give a package to a man with a different first name than the addressee.  He needs to bring a signed statement or an identity card of the addressee himself.  In the last panel we learn that the addressee is the man's three-year-old son and this package is his birthday gift.  An elderly woman with a cane sits on a bench in a park and watches agile runners go by, focusing on their hips and feet, and then gets up and toddles away.  Gritty art fits the tone of these bitter stories.  The search for fables sometimes takes me to surprising places!

This is a fascinating effort.  I bought this print-on-demand copy because I found an 1891 edition with the same title and thought I could learn more from a reprint of the 1776 original.  It seems from that reprint that there is some controversy about the authorship of this book.  In fact, this book is sparse.  At its center are the first four books of La Fontaine's fables in Gascon French dialect.  At the book's beginning one finds two elements: a pictorial title-page naming the publisher, Paul Fauvet Duhard in Bayonne, and a second illustration page showing La Fontaine, surrounded by Gloria, Fama, Veritas, and Prudentia.  Bodemann #163 notes that the art was done by Jean Michel Moreau le jeune and engraved by Noel Le Mire.  The four books are followed by a dictionary of Gascon French (263-84), which was not inclusive enough to help this reader make it through the first fable.  I am suspicious because La Fontaine's 22 lines of verse in GA took 32 lines to translate here.  There are some printer's designs after fables along the way.

This paperback is apparently a re-issue of a hardbound book of the same title by the same publisher in 2001.  Virgile, Léon Crabbé, died at the age of about eighty in 1970, having written, apparently, hundreds of columns – especially in the column "Pourquoi Pas?" -- and having made many recordings.  Many see him. as does his friend Jean Francis, as the the ideal manifestation of the spirit of Brussels.  Here we have seventeen of his redoings of La Fontaine's fables and then about twenty-four of his "fables personnelles."  These are followed by "the fables of Suske le Brugeois, Noel Barcy."  This is yet another pseudonym for the author.  These again take up La Fontaine as models, but they seem to add some mockery of Brugians' confusion with French articles, masculine and feminine.  They also play more drastically with the endings of La Fontaine's fables.  A last section offers the originals of La Fontaine's fables developed in this book.  This book was sitting at my door as I returned to my room after my first breakfast at St. Michel Jesuit high school in Brussels.  The author had been mentioned at breakfast.  I value the book as a wonderful gift!  Footnotes and a Brussels vocabulary help!  The cover presents a crow perched on a tall building looking down with cheese in his beak at a waiting fox.  Jean Francis: "Si vous voulez vous ouvrir le coeur de Bruxelles, je ne vois guère d'autre clé."

Here is a heavy square book of 9" with 253 pages of "dream stories."  The first twenty-six of the forty stories here are traditional fables.  Each story receives a title-page and four pages of mixed text and illustration.  A sixth page presents a break before the next story.  The beginning story of wolf and lamb is not the more frequent fable that sees the latter devoured but rather the more comfortable story in which the lamb turns down the request of the tired wolf for a drink of water that would revive him enough to attack the lamb.  Next a clever old hen remains when a fox attacks the hen house and convinces him that he has nothing to gain from an old hen.  The little fish not only appeals to the angler, but her whole family jumps out of the water around the boat calling for her.  He throws her back and then catches some oysters in a net.  The emphasis here seems to be on finding a happy ending, even to traditional fables that are curelly realistic.  When the miller catches his ass in the lion skin, he reprehends him but does not seem to offer any further punishment.  Other fables, like FC, which have less drastic traditional finishes, seem to be told traditionally.  The ass that kicks the wolf really does have an injured ankle.  This telling softens dangerously, I believe, the moral of BW: "If you lie habitually, no one will believe you when you tell the truth."  Only "habitually"?  The stag escapes the dogs who chase him after he has admired himself in the water.  The last fourteen accounts cover such things as radios, boats, trains, and tractors.  It comes as no surprise that the accent of the artwork is on "cute" throughout.

Justin Schiller's catalogues have always been both stimulating and informative for me.  This catalogue, though smaller, does the same.  Four fable items are featured among the fifty-five objects here.  The very first item is the first edition of the first Danish Reynard for $30,000.  We have seldom been able to deal at Schiller's price levels!  #16 is William Godwin's "Fables Ancient and Modern" from 1805.  This is a lovely hand-colored printing of 1805.  I have enjoyed this work by Godwin (Edward Baldwin) but our copies are later and not hand-colored.  #30 is a Dutch La Fontaine's Fables with designs after those of Gustave Doré.  This item would someday be of interest to me because it colors the black-and-white illustrations of Doré.  #51 is a bibliography of Thomas Bewick's works.  The range of things Schiller can offer is breathtaking!

Contrary to the subtitle found only on the cover, these are not fables but rather eight-to-ten-line mythological entries by character, starting with Pandora, Prometheus, and Phaethon.  They may be a good way to help some students get into Latin.  There are fifty pages, paginated with Latin numerals.  Though Amazon gives the publisher as CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, the book itself offers www.arepo.biz.

This book may mix stories from Babbitt's 1912 and 1922 editions, titled respectively "Jataka Tales" and "More Jataka Tales."  Both were published by The Century Company and illustrated by Ellsworth Young.  Simpler drawings here have been substituted for Young's work.  There are twenty-one stories here.  "How the Turtle Saved His Own Life" (23) is still wonderfully pleasing  The fishes in "The Three Fishes" (130) are again named as in the standard Kalila and Dimna story, but the story now has to do with one fish who saves two others from a net.  The covers present a human child walking in front of a baboon.

This is for me a favorite version of Andersen's great story because it is so frank about the Emperor's nudity.  The cover's image is the same as that on the title-page, and both are explicit about showing him naked except for shoes and crown.  I wonder if one could publish this book in the USA.  The artist has fun with this story start to finish.  Consider the first double image.  While the emphasis is on the Emperor, there is so much going on.  A rat looks on from above while another is running across the top of the wall.  A pig is eating a piece of carrot.  A child has a hand in a pail.  A dog chases a rooster.  People are doing things everywhere, except perhaps for the sleepy guards.  This Emperor has a very sloppy room, littered with clothes and food and leftovers from food.  The artist is also careful with people's eyes, as with those of the Emperor when he later looks at himself in the mirror before he wears his new outfit.  The last pages are the best, with their enjoyment of the Emperor's not-so-special body.  In a last picture, the wise child looks over the Emperor's shoulder as he writes.  Good fun!

Here is a strong small (6¾" x 9½") presentation of prose texts for 21 fables on left-hand pages with alternating colored and black-and-white illustrations on right-hand pages.  My understanding from the book is that Jiri Trnka has founded his own publishing studio.  That fact helps explain an anomaly.  The illustrations seem to be those strong illustrations that Trnka used in the seven or eight versions we already have of his work.  Those have various dates ranging back to 1962 and through the sixties, seventies, and eighties for books in Czech, French, English, Spanish, and German.  This book refers, as far as I can tell, to none of those and claims a 2010 copyright.  So I presume that Trnka is repackaging his own work from earlier and asserting his copyright over that work.  This version has the familiar purple-clad wolf as shepherd on its cover and on 45.  Very good colored illustrations include the hawk clutching the frog tied to the mouse (9); two goats on a bridge (25); and, best of all, MSA (37) with a great face on the miller as he looks back at the jeering traveler.  T of C at the end.

I knew this book from its origin, "The Contest Between the Sun and the Wind: An Aesop's Fable" published by August House in 2008.  Like its original, this French version follows the correct version of the fable.  Forest tells the whole story well.  The art does a good job of matching the two forces, e.g., when they together form a circle on the title-page.  Gaber can use two pages together for a landscape view, as when the man bends with the wind, or for a portrait view on the following pages, when the wind blows harder and the man holds onto his coat.  Here there is no contact or interchange between the two rounds; the wind simply blusters off.  The man in the sunshine not only unbuttons his coat.  He also sings out loud.  Finally, he takes off his coat and sits in a shady spot.  The wind returns and tells the sun that he cannot imagine that the sun could do any better than he did.  The sun shows him the man sitting and playing his flute.  "How did you FORCE him to take off his coat!"  The sun answers that he won his way through gentleness.  When the wind opines that there must have been a trick, the sun offers to show him the "don" and the "choix" that did it.  The story wisely does not give the wind's answer.  The author adds only "The Sun just smiled.."  This lovely book is dedicated to "tous les Gens de paix."

The story is described in the subtitle as an Indian "conte."  Right at the start the Brahman is described as the person who can never do evil animals, who treats them like brothers.  In this version, the tiger asks to be allowed to get out – just for a moment -- for a drink of water.  After he is liberated and then confronts the Brahman, they agree to consult the first five living beings that they encounter.  Those five here turn out to be a fig tree, a buffalo, an eagle, a crocodile, and then a jackal.  At the end, it is the Brahman that finally puts the bolt through the latch on the bamboo cage.  The tiger is of course surprised to find himself again locked in.  At that point the jackal says "Oh, there was a latch and a bolt."  The jackal bows to the Brahman, says goodbye, and goes away.  A page at the end locates India and the story, ATU 155.  The art is stylized and colorful.  A good typical illustration shows the tiger pinning down the jackal (9).  6½" x 7¾".

Here are four stories: “The Jackal and the Drum”; “The Most Dangerous Animal”; “Two Snakes and the Princess”; and “The Donkey’s Song.”  7½” x 9¼”.  There are four other Panchatantra titles in this series, along with some 15 other books.  The first story is told slightly differently from what I have usually heard.  The drum is part of a military camp, and the jackal comes to believe that it is the storage place for their food.  He finally hits it hard with a club and then laughs at himself for being scared of something.  I ask myself: Might not the soldiers hear that kind of boom?  The second story features a poor Brahmin finding four creatures trapped in a well.  From there the familiar story goes its way.  The tiger, the ape, and the snake stand by the man, while the human being proves to be the most dangerous.  One of the snakes in the third story lives inside the prince’s stomach.  The silly donkey sings out of gratitude to a jackal for showing him a field of cucumbers that they visit every evening.

This is the Hebrew version of Usborne's book of 2008.  It is unclear whether this Hebrew version was first published in 2008 or 2010; this printing is 2010.  It appears that some of the latter stories in the 93-page original are dropped in this 80-page book.  There are still recognizable fables here, among them "Brer Rabbit and the Tug of War" (18).  "How Bear Lost His Tail" (24) features the usual ice-fishing trick and one of the book's most brilliant pictures: bear covered with snow while his tail is locked into the frozen hole (27).  LM (29) has nice touches like the mouse sliding down the lion's face until he is perched on the lion's nose.  Two more fables are "The Monkey and the Crocodile" (34) and GA (59).  The latter is particularly well illustrated.  I could make out enough of the Hebrew to see that, as in the English original, this grasshopper learns his lesson!

Here is, I believe, a real rarity.  Two students in the Department of Publishing Studies at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology  took up as their final project establishing a writing club at a primary school and publishing a collection of their stories.  The result is a number of one-page and two-page stories on pages 8 through 41 of this 7½" x 7" pamphlet.  I find these fables among them: "The Big Fish" (26-27), an original fable about going out into the big and dangerous world and coming satisfied back home; FM (34-35); and "The Twins and Their Younger Brother" (38-39) about a younger brother who should have learned from the misdeeds of his older brothers.  Each story is complemented by a full-page crayon drawing by its author.  The authors range in age from 8 to 11.  In this version of FM, the negligent frog apparently did not know that he was killing the frog.  The hawk attacked when the frog back on land "sported" the Mouse.

Eight stories, moving from shorter fables to expanded fables or folktales.  The first two are traditional fables: "The Fox and the Jaguar" about sharing and "The Doe and the Fawn" about obeying a parent.  The foreword is correct: the longer stories contain familiar fable motifs, like a farming partner cleverly choosing either what is above or what is below ground depending on the crop.  Each story has a pleasant multi-colored illustration on a separate title-page that repeats the names of the author and illustrator.  The name of the author is then repeated again on the next page, together with the story's title again.  Several stories have a second and even a third image.  This is apparently a print-upon-demand book.

This is a large (8½" x 10½") 32-page pamphlet containing three stories: "The Emperor's New Clothes"; "Dick Whittington"; and "The Three Heads in the Well."  The best feature of "Emperor" is the procession which presents the king fully naked in the midst of his clothed attendants and clothed citizenry.  This parade illustration stretches across two pages (10-11) showing "a rather plump middle-aged man wearing nothing at all" (10).  This emperor goes through with the parade.  The next morning he throws out his full-length mirrors.

This is a borderline member of a fable collection.  I was attracted by the book, and it is a local Bay Area product.  It represents a simple story of a hare's house taken over by a fox.  She had lived in a "Crystal Palace" of ice, but when it melted she took over the hare's home.  Three daunting would-be protectors are frightened off by the fox when they try to oust her: wolf, bear, and bull.  Then the unlikely rooster threatens the fox and stays with his threats until she vacates.  The rooster and the hare live together then in their cozy wooden hut.  One of the best of the illustrations occurs after the bull has been scared off.  The hare lies desolate and crying on the ground, separated even from his knapsack, in an almost entirely dull brown scene.  The dark silhouette of the fox glares menacing against white in the house's window.  The book is simple fun, nicely illustrated.

This is a sturdy, well executed "print to order" book.  It includes sections on Frog Kings, Princes and Bridegrooms; Frog Brides; Frog Wooing and Courting; More Frog Tales; Fables; and a one-member section of "Additional Materials," including only "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."  The fable section includes items #66 through 93 and covers 232-270.  The fables attributed to Aesop are presented in the versions of Thomas James and Joseph Jacobs.  The versions of both are presented for "The Hares and the Frogs" (233); OF (239); and FK (241).  The story about three fish from the Panchatantra here includes a frog named "Single Wit."  His one reaction outdoes the reactions of the supposedly smart fishes, named "Hundred Wits" and "Thousand Wits."  Particularly well told is "The Frog, the Craw-fish, and the Serpent" (257).  Watch out!  That story takes a second turn.

This is an impressive book.  It is a Russian book published in the USA.  It is a contemporary book that recognizes what Krylov was doing in his moment of history.  It combines classic texts with present-day translations and present-day illustrations.  Well done!  The translator's introduction (9-13) is a good introduction to both Krylov and this edition.  The colored illustrations are lively and engaging.  It is so good to see Krylov presented as contemporary and fun!  I give a prize to "The Man and His Shadow" for both text and illustration (20-21).  Enjoy the thrush to the squirrel: "Well, it's clear./You run like mad, but never get an inch from here" (23).  I never thought that I would see "The Swan, the Pike and the Crab" illustrated as a human fable (24-25)!  The control of English verse may be at its best in "The Titmouse" (41).  "Two Dogs" (47) is excellent.  Fifi's great talent is that she can walk on two paws!  "The Cuckoo and the Rooster" (53) is right on target: This is Krylov's kind of satire.  The Russian and English are presented throughout on facing pages.  "The Wolf and the Cat" presents a fine count-down of possibilities for the wolf who has outraged everyone (51).  Typical of Krylov's wit is "The Mosquito and the Shepherd" (71).  To warn the shepherd of the approaching serpent, the mosquito bit the shepherd.  That awakened the shepherd, but before he killed the wolf, he smashed the mosquito.  "You must exert the greatest care/In warning big shots to beware."  LM takes a curious turn here.  The lion comes to rue the day that he disregarded the mouse (79).  "The Cat and the Nightingale" (91) is another tour de force.  What nightingale can sing well when about to be devoured?  The only fables that seem to violate the rule of "two pages" are the title-fable, FK (98-101), and "Friendship Among Dogs" (114-17).  The last two pages present a bilingual catalogue of "winged phrases," common aphorisms in Russian.  For many reasons, this will be from now on my go-to Krylov fable book!

Here is a most curious pamphlet 7⅞" x 7½" and twelve pages long.  I have dealt with the same series of illustrations in similar pamphlets in a complete series written in English and Vietnamese (2008) and a single pamphlet of BW in English/Thai (2007).  Now here is a book like one in the complete series and also like one pictured on the back cover of the Thai pamphlet, but this pamphlet offers only English.  It advertises clearly that it is from Macaw Books, but the copyright belongs to Class Publishing House in Thailand.  Now the last big surprise in this booklet is that, when one turns the page from the cover promising LM, one finds a booklet presenting BW!  This is a publisher's or printer's mistake!  My, the surprises when one tracks down a fable or two!  The English text is not the same as that in either the Vietnamese version or the Thai version.  Mysteries abound!

This Hebrew edition credits the Little Brown copyright in the US from 2009.  What gets added to the pictures along the way are, I bet, more sounds than words.  There is a page at the end in English listing donors and partners.  I will include my comments from the original edition.  I write above that Pinkney is the author.  Actually, the story of LM is beautifully presented almost without words.  Pinkney himself had summed up the tale in the "Artist's Note" in the English edition.  Pinkney's presentation is strong and winning.  As he himself says, he ends up expanding the fable, especially by the inclusion of family.  His art still reminds me of Frederick Richardson.

Here is a lucky rare find on a Saturday afternoon in Frankfurt at the last of the antiquarian bookshops Franz and I were able to reach.  It was worth the trip!  Many factors come together to make this a special piece in the collection.  The excellence of its production, the very small number of copies, the Luther Fraktur print, the Chinese "Kalligraphiepapier"; and the Fabriano binding.  Steinhöwel's version has a single human intruder, and his "Feldmaus" gives a long speech, perhaps best summed up in "Du hast keine sicherheit."  She even mentions a cat that has not appeared in the story.  Steinhöwel's moral criticizes people who want to live above their station.  The cuts are subtle and lovely, suggesting things like the sun, the grain of the fields,  the door of the city, the cat, and the human intruder.

"Three fables, originally from Ancient Greece."  WSC, BW, and "The Wolf and the Goat."  Good tellings by Pie Corbett.  One of the best illustrations shows the wolf dreaming of eating: he sits at a table with a nice bib, holding a knife and fork!  In this version, the shepherd chooses this "sheep" because it is the thinnest.  And he does not discover its true character until the wife is preparing to roast it!  In BW, the shepherd boy plays his trick "again and again."  A pack of wolves arrives on the scene.  The wolves take all the sheep.  The third story is usually told, I believe, with a fox tricking the goat into the well as a ladder to let him climb out.  All three of the artists with their divergent styles do a creditable job with their tales.  Well done!

I bought a second copy of this book by mistake, but it turns out to be quite distinct.  The pages inside are identical, and so is the basic picture on the front cover.  Changed are most of the classifications and logos around these elements.  The front cover, for example, adds "Myths and Legends" to the "Tree Tops" name and logo in the upper left of the front cover.  The latter's logo has also changed.  "Oxford" in the lower right is moved and its background color has changed.  On the back cover, this book was in "Stage 9" and "KS2 Book Band Y3 Brown."  Now it is in "Book Band 12 Brown" and "Oxford Level 10."  The format of the back cover and of the inside front cover has also changed.  As is clear from the same six titles listed in them, "Stages 9 and 10" have become "Levels 10 and 11."  As I wrote of that book, it advertises "Three fables, originally from Ancient Greece."  WSC, BW, and "The Wolf and the Goat."  Good tellings by Pie Corbett.  One of the best illustrations shows the wolf dreaming of eating: he sits at a table with a nice bib, holding a knife and fork!  In this version, the shepherd chooses this "sheep" because it is the thinnest.  And he does not discover its true character until the wife is preparing to roast it!  In BW, the shepherd boy plays his trick "again and again."  A pack of wolves arrives on the scene.  The wolves take all the sheep.  The third story is usually told, I believe, with a fox tricking the goat into the well as a ladder to let him climb out.  All three of the artists with their divergent styles do a creditable job with their tales.  Well done!

Eight fables, with a T of C at the book's end.  The author and artist take good liberties with the fables.  In BC, the cat catches seven mice with one paw.  Moral: "Fácil es abrir la boca.  Difícil, hacer las cosas."  Wolf and dog engage in conversation about their ancestors, with the watchdog rather arrogantly explaining that his part of the family got civilized when they were domesticated.  He invites the wolf to come and eat at his house "with four paws."  The moral asks who chose better, the wolf or the dog?  Wolf to goat on the cliff has a great line: "Ea, ea, ea!  Qué dulce esta el pasto en la pradera!"  FC is told with grapes as the prize.  46 may present the best illustration for the key moment in FC.  The crow looks down not quite realizing yet what he has done; the fox jumps up with two outstretched paws to catch the grapes.  The mouse in LM is blinded by the sun and so gets somehow onto the lion's back.  An unusual illustration shows the mouse caught in the reflections in both of the lion's eyes (56).  The editor plays with words like "menos" on 9, making the later letters of the word smaller than the earlier ones.  The art work is lively but rather predictable.  A sample illustration might be on 34, as the three bulls look askance at each other, while the lion waits under a nearby tree.  The endpapers show the goat looking down from his cliff.

"Ausgewaehlt und herausgegeben fuer die Freunde er KKB Bank."  I recognize the lovely artwork, here again beautifully produced, from KKB's calendar of 1982.  The illustrations are executed in small format here with exceptional care.   If KKB commissioned this artwork in the first place, I am so glad that they went back to it!

This book of thirty-one stories is surprising.  It starts with a life of Gautama Buddha, includes fables from the Jatakas and Aesop, and advertises itself as "Panchatantra."  Tales I have encountered as part of the Jatakas include "The Golden Deer" (29), "The Golden Goose" (36), "The Great Monkey King" (42), and "The Noble Stag" (61).  The Aesopic stories I had not seen in Indian traditions include DLS (20), BW (126), MSA (132), and TH (137).  Of course there are familiar stories from among those known as part of the Panchatantra, like "The Lion and the Cow" (55) and "The Woodpecker, the Tortoise, and the Antelope" (106).  Thus "Panchatantra" seems to be understood here as a generic name for "fables."  The opening short section on the Buddha has him recouonting the path of dharma through stories of his previous births.  "These have come to be called Panchatantra, some 547 of which are still in circulation today" (7).  The second story tells of King Sivi, who gave his eyes to a blind man and was rewarded by the God Sakka with a new pair of eyes.  DLS features a merchant who deliberately, removes his goods from a donkey's back, puts a lion's skin on the donkey, and lets him loose in the fields to eat (20).  One group of plucky farmers bands together and kills the "lion."  There is a crucial misprint of "leer" for "deer" on 30.  Again, there is "looses" for "loses" on 41.

This little (3¾: x 4½") booklet of 20 pages is highly adapted from TMCM.  Lilo makes the trip to the city because harvest time drives her away from the field she has enjoyed.  She goes to a nearby house.  She encounters the cat.  Full of angst she hides.  After she has escaped the cat, she meets Max who takes her to the Speisekammer.  Lilo confesses that the good life here is not without danger.  "Yes," Max answers, "but we have here the finest food."  They spend a wonderful winter in the house together, especially in the kids' room.  But the kids capture Lilo in a box and take her outside.  It is spring now, and Lilo says it is just the right time for a trip into the wheatfield.  Text and a few designs are on left-hand pages.  Illustrations are on the right.  Best of the endearing illustrations may be Lilo's bed in a shoe on 7.

I believe that this book is based on an original named "Belle Fiabe."  It includes a broad selection of some dozen children's stories including apparently several fables like "The Donkey and the Flute"; "The Poor Cobbler"; "The Fox and the Goat"; BS; and BW.  I recognize also "The Bremen Musicians."  The images are large and colorful, and the paper is heavy.  This is one of the trophies I was able to bring back from Budapest's used book shops on the same street as our Air bnb.  I found this book three places on the web, but none of them offers a date for the book

"The Baker Fables" is an enjoyable little (4"x 5¾") two-staple pamphlet of 12 shiny pages presenting five fables, each with a full-page colored illustration and the other page quoting some of La Fontaine's fable.  The unusual point here is that almost every character, whatever his role in the fable, is somehow a baker and/or is holding some bakery.  While the ant decorates a cake, the grasshopper clutches a bagguette.  The lamb encountering the wolf is carrying a sack of bagguettes, perhaps to Grandma!  While the frog has a cake, the ox has a full loaf, and both wear baker's hats.  What a lovely ephemeral gift!  Google cannot find another copy.

Here are 107 Aesopic fables in Hebrew, many of them accompanied by highly stylized woodcuts.  Among the best of the illustrations may be "The Donkey and the Lapdog" (25); "The Cat and the Fox" (99); and "The Monkey Mother" (112).  Several stories seem to have been varied slightly here.  The lion faces four bulls, not three (59).  What is usually a stag is here a ram whose horns get caught in the branches while dogs pursue him (80).  There is a T of C at the beginning.  121 pages.  5¼" x 8¼".  This book seems to have been published with the support of the Liebovitz and Kest Families.

I have returned to this book not regarding that I had already catalogued it without looking into it.  This is not the first time that this has happened: too many books and too many years!  I will start with my more recent (2020) assessment and then include my comments made in 2016.  My temptation with this recent paperback is to take to task specific statements.  Reading a good review online in Hackney Citizen helped: https://www.hackneycitizen.co.uk/2012/06/27/a-brief-history-of-fables-from-aesop-to-flash-fiction-review/  Now I would say that what Rourke may do best of all is to alert us to the staying power of the fable genre.  Rourke finds it appearing in literary territories we may not suspect, including flash fiction.  Some of the things I would argue with probably group around Rourke's tying Aesop to the "mythic."  He finds a great structuring sense that the Aesopic has given to life in age after age.  He sees the life of Aesop as a sacred story expressing deeply held beliefs.  A part of this story for Rourke is the Aesopic "no" saying that Aesop does not know where the journey will end.  He sees Aesop's speechlessness as a basic trauma out of which his fabling grows.  For him, the Aesopic "no" counters the Socratic.  I find Socrates rather to be the master of the "I do not know," and I do not see fables or even the life of Aesop digging that deeply into our values, but this book is making me think again.  I can quibble on smaller things.  Phaedrus, for example, did not write "rhymes."  By contrast, I am intrigued with the thought that L'Estrange was the start of fables associated with the education of children.  That is certainly what Croxall feared!  I find Rourke perceptive in his coverage of La Fontaine.  There is plenty more here, and I am happy to have made a start.  What I wrote earlier follows.  I look forward to reading further into this paperback of some 178 pages.  I suspect that my sense of fable will give me trouble with the third and fourth of the four chapters.  The first chapter is devoted to Aesop's life, work, and influence.  The second handles Marie de France, Rumi, William Caxton, and Jean de La Fontaine.  The third deals with modern fabulists and the modern novel: Robert Walker, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, and Thomas Bernhard.  The fourth handles post-fabulists, meta-fabulists, and flash fiction.  The cover's picture of a stack of books looks suspiciously like the shelves in my collection, but I wonder if those books really exist: "The Tortoise Finds a Hair"; "The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing and other Cross Dressing Creatures"; "A Foxes Guide to Lapine"!  My!

This is a sturdy children's book that does offer "a story a day."  The 365 stories are written by twelve different writers and illustrated by twenty-six different illustrators.  There are some twenty-two fables mixed in, all but one of them identified by a moral phrased as "Aesop's moral."  One of the cleverest of these is to SS:  "One solution does not fit all problems" (63).  The non-Aesopic fable is "Ungrateful Tiger" (298).  Fables are given one or two pages each.  Each page regularly gets one attractive small illustration.  One or two key words on each page are in larger pitch for emphasis by young readers.  There is a great deal of poetry in the book, often in the form of six short poems on a two-page spread, often right before a fable.  The fables here are FC (12); FG (38); DS (39); BF (54); SS (62); LM (74); FS (76); FWT (128); TH (164); "The Mouse and the Weasel" (206); "The Bat" (234); "How the Bear Lost His Tail" (244); "The Fat Hen" (253); WC (260); "The Swallow and the Crow" (283); CP (320); "The Fox and the Goat" (328); "The Tortoise and the Eagle" (332), and TMCM (348).  Four typical illustrations are on 282-283. 

The back cover of this 40-page booklet speaks of "an Aesop-inspired morality poem about notable crimes."  Is that "forward" by Handy a deliberate play on the standard "foreword"?  In it Handy, editor of tinytowntimes.com, a blog in Crawford's home town of Ithaca, NY, writes that "Crawford chose to versify petty crimes of nominal import then added a quirky, often nonsensical, moral."  For Handy it is the art of Stuhmiller that raises this book to art.  Each of eighteen stories follows the same two-page format.  On the left-hand page is a title and a police report.  On the right-hand page is verse and moral set within a full-page illustration.  These illustrations remind me of the chromolithographs of Walter Crane.  The second story, "Grand Farcery," is a good example.  Its last lines are "O! What a farce when we/Land on our arse and we/Get popped for grand larceny."  The moral is "Since all the world's a stage, always have an exit strategy."  Among the more curious police reports is that in "Play It Straight."  The report here is of "a subject walking strangely and carrying a cello case."  Another caller reports finding a fork in her shower.  My prize overall goes to "The Russian Hairdresser's Boy Toy."  All in all, this booklet represents one of the weirdest uses of Aesop's name that I have known.

Here is a 2011 print-upon-demand reprint of 1906 book.  80 pages.  The copy from which the print was made had previously been owned by the New York Public Library.  Apparently the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century was a great time for conceiving of books in rhyme, a tendency in English that goes back to Jefferys Taylor in 1821.  The verse here is sometimes forced.  The rhyming morals are generally abundantly clear.  I wonder if this might be a helpful book to use to tell a fable that people have not previously known.  The rhythm and rhyme do help to carry the story forward, even if there are occasional filler-words or filler-phrases.  There is an illustration on every second to fourth page.  I find it unusual that the copyrighted publisher is, at least apparently, the wife of the writer, Mrs. M.L.G. Thummel.  Is the A.L. quoted before the first fable Abraham Lincoln?

The front cover of the dust jacket presents this book's challenge well: Velasquez's Aesop stands in the hallway of a prison.  What a wide-ranging book!  It finds the "Aesopic" in so many genres!  Let me quote the back of the dust jacket:  "What do critical thinkers do when political, social or religious circumstances are hostile to truth and open discussion? One possibility is to seek refuge in the realm of the Aesopic and veil opinions about the ruling authorities in symbolic and coded terms, retreating to fairy tales and fables, and employing myths and elements of folklore. Such Aesopic voices create an alternative discursive form of protest and subversion. This collection attempts to break new academic ground. While Aesop has now been a 'household name' (and as such mostly been related to children's stories) for at least a century and a half, academic recognition of Aesopic art and writing has been relatively sparse. Our book intends to fuel systematic analysis and appreciation of such examples of Aesopic creation. The contributions offer thought-provoking insights which span the five continents of the globe and more than a century. The book brings together historians, literary scholars, film theorists, scholars from Australian Indigenous studies, cultural theorists and arts practitioners."  I look forward to reading this book of some 468 pages.  I count some nineteen contributors.  Ambitious book!

The cover announces "Each fable has been rewritten at 3 different levels."  This is a print-upon-demand paperback book in large format printed in January, 2014.  Perhaps typical of such books is that it gives a web address for the publisher but no physical location for the book's printing.  The book features twenty fables.  One full-page design in white and three shades of black accompanies each fable and is repeated in smaller format.  The fables are rewritten at three levels "to address the variety of reading levels found in all primary classrooms."  From my survey of the fables, what changes from level to level is especially the qualification of things and actions.  The vocabulary gets more extensive and specific with each level.  The morals do not change from one level to the next.  One can watch the progress from one level to the next, for example, in "The Dog and the Oyster": "He ate eggs every day" becomes "He ate eggs from the henhouse everyday" and then " "Every day he sneaked into the henhouse and snatched all the eggs!"  In  the first fable, "The Blue Heron," the fish rejected get larger in the second and third rounds.  In La Fontaine's original, the best comes first -- carp and pike -- followed by the lesser tench and the even lesser gudgeon.  After a period of finding no fish, La Fontaine's heron settles for the lowly snail.  Here there are three rounds of bigger and bigger fish and then, after a whole afternoon of nothing, the snail.  The best of the illustrations may be that for DS on 59.  GA on 58 is well told in its third version.  It avoids both the final encounter of grasshopper with ant and the resolution of the story.  Instead it leaves the former sadly searching for food in the snow.

Here is a paperback reprint of the Avenel version published in NY in the 70's or 80's.  There is no reference to the original Rackham publication in 1912.  The color illustrations are not included.  The silhouette illustrations come out well, but some of the other black-and-white illustrations seem to have lost quite a bit.  Examples are on 84 and 234.  The covers offer a curious image of a procession of creatures along a road flanked by mushroom-like trees.  The T of C covers some ten pages at the book's beginning.

Here is a sturdy 144-page book with a fable on every page after the first six pages, which include a numbered T of C on 4-6.  Each page has a strong colored cartoon at its top, and each adds a moral.  I find it a good rendition of the fables with lively cartoons.  There are some curiosities along the way.  The shepherd's own goats on 7 are referred to as the "later" where we would say "latter."  The same question arises with "betted" on 21.  Why might "Rabbit and Frog" on 11 mention that the frogs overheard the rabbits' suicide plans?  And why have the frogs jump out of the river rather than into it?  The version of UP here has a wolf bringing the good news that there is no killing.  In this version the hen in the tree sees a lion coming (29).  "The Unfaithful Ass" (129) has the dying ass ask "Why the hell did I set out to fight?"  We do not find that language in children's books here.  Despite the little stumbling blocks I have mentioned, I find these stories and pictures well done.

This work is a triumph! It is wonderful! Five fables follow this pattern: a single fable gets a major pop-up in the center of its two pages. The early part of the story is in a small fold-out element in the lower left; the late part of the story is in a small fold-out element in the lower right. A moral occurs in a small paper-ploy in the upper right. This can be a level or a pop-up or another little use of the pop-up's possibilities. After three of these and before the last two is a different element. It has WS at its center; arranged around it are four other stories. In each, one lifts the cover to find a smaller fold-out that tells the story. The five major stories are GGE, FC, TH, LM, and GA. The smaller stories around WS are DS, TB, FG, and "The Horse and the Stag." Special prizes go to: the lower-right scene in FC, in which we can see the cheese dropping from the crow's mouth towards the fox; the lower-left opening scene in LM, which has the lion dangling the mouse in the air; and the upper-left story of DS, which includes a mirror in which we, like the dog, can see the bigger bone in the water. Most impressive construction among the five main stories might be FC. The crow and tree tower up further and further as the book is opened. Unfortunately, WS is told in the poorer version. This book is a genuine treasure. I am glad that I pre-ordered a second copy by mistake.

Here is a privately published, printed upon demand paperback book of some 153 pages after ten pages of introduction.  Each fable gets a new page; a few run over onto a second page.  As the back cover says, "On a light note, H. Jerome Alter has couched a selection of Aesop's fables in verse."  The titles are original and clever.  Thus the first fable about an eagle wounded by an eagle feather is titled "The Sharpest Irony" (1).  Alter's morals can get topical, as in this very fable, which describes the attack on Pearl Harbor and then points out that we in the USA had shipped the Japanese the "steel to build the bombs to launch this war."  I find the tellings of the fables lively here and engaging, though encumbered by the need to rhyme.  That need creates some unusual word order.  "The Foolish Lion" (5) is new to me.  A hunter waits in a tree near the carcass of a stag partially eaten by a lion.  When the latter returns, the former shoots him.  "Nor would a thief in confidence sublime,/Revisit the location of his crime."  I want to consult more of these lively texts for oral presentation in future lectures.  The clever titles make finding a specific fable difficult.  I could not find a version here of GA, for example.

Here is a paperbound book almost certainly produced in Israel and offering large vocabularly helps before and during the fables.  The "before" element is a list of Hebrew vocabularly for the many animals that appear in the fables.  The "during" help consists in many vocables at the bottom of each page.   176 pages.  Illustrations from Rackham appear frequently throughout the book.  The cover illustration is a cartoon of the woodman attacking trees now tht the trees have granted him an axe-handle.  Someone has already got lots of use out of this book!

I am surprised that this book claims a publication date of 2011, for it is well worn.  I would have guessed a much earlier publication date.  Its internal binding is repaired in several places.  Did Tolstoy in fact translate so many of these Aesopic fables in fairly traditional form?  I find none of Tolstoy's own engaging stories here.  What we do find is great traditional Aesopic fables, with classic illustrations for the majority of them, about 3" x 2".  51 pp + 3.  5¼" x 8¼".

Originally published in 2011 in English as "Aesop's Fables" by Frances Lincoln Children's Books.  On my last afternoon in Sweden, I asked at one bookstore on the way home and they directed me to their main store, where I found this book.  It is as identical as a translated book can be, with the exception of the dust jacket that the English original had.  As I wrote about the English original, this book put together by two persons who grew up in South Africa is a serious addition to the Aesop tradition.  Its particular niche is that it uses African animals in otherwise perfectly traditional Aesopic fables.  Thus we have jackal for fox, tamboti for oak, warthog for boar, and kudu for stag.  I find both the tellings and the illustrations unusually attentive to the working of the tales.  That attention is born out in Naidoo's "Dear Reader" that immediately precedes the fables: "Aesop's fables aren't like fairy tales from Europe with 'happy ever after' endings.  They are much more like traditional African stories.  Life is tough.and things can end badly for anyone who doesn't watch out or use their wits!" (7).  That introduction argues even that Aesop's background was African.  Naidoo pays good attention to both the tellings and morals.  Thus the "Old Lion" story is moralized this way: "Not everyone is fooled by an old trick" (9).  And in "The Eagle and the Tortoise," the tortoise claims "I can wave my flippers in the air.  Just get me up there and I'll show you" (10).  I am surprised by the image of Aesop riding on a panther with his arms and legs bound (6).  I would not have thought of that as a way to convey a captured slave!  The illustrations are done with pencil and watercolors.

Here is a refreshingly innovative presentation -- in watercolor and colored pencil -- that, in a surprise ending, has the ant discovering the wanna-be singer in himself.  Ant is an accountant who wears pince-nez and wears a visor.  He counts the items in his storeroom every afternoon.  Grasshopper wears a red cap and plays a fiddle.  When Ant says "Well, I never!" Grasshopper responds "Well, I always."  Grasshopper's fiddling sometimes confuses Ant: "Drat that hoppergrass!"  At Grasshopper's first winter request, Ant slams the door and returns to counting.  In a November dream, Ant is a performer hearing "Play!  Dance!  Sing!"  He can do nothing.  He gets up to seek and find Grasshopper on his doorstep.  After he tells him to go home and hears "No home," he drags him into the house and before the fire.  After many winter days and nights together, the two catch each other saying "Anyone can count" and "Anyone can sing."  The book's good last line is "Everybody counts!"  I like this book!

The key to this book lies in the last word of its subtitle: "raiders."  Schelby adapts Aesop ably to the corporate world of today.  Six at least of the first 14 fables are taken directly from Aesop and then adapted to the corporate world.  Aesop continues to appear along the way.  Grandville's illustrations are well chosen and well placed.  A particular feature of this presentation lies in the several quip quotations at the end of each fable. My prize goes to Lady Violet Bonham Carter: "Sir Stafford has a brilliant mind, until it is made up" (8).  There is a T of C at the beginning.  Printed upon demand.  77 pages.  About 6" x 9".

I was happy to find this reprint online after finding a copy of the first printing in very poor condition.  A main purpose of my trying to find it is somewhat frustrated: the fascinating illustrations there are not well rendered here, and only about 15 of the original illustrations there are presented here.  This reprint -- apparently the sixth reprint since 1901 -- includes a serious essay by Kathleen Gyssels.  The French and Haitian Creole appear on facing pages.  The La Fontaine texts have themselves undergone conversion.  I can mostly follow them; when it comes to the Creole, I am mostly lost!  The cover advertises this book as including a CD, but that did not come with this copy.  This is a print-upon-demand book produced in Coppell, TX.  "Cric? Crac!" apparently translates in English into "Click!"

This is a sturdy little book of some 224 pages and some 200 fables.  A helpful introduction gives a sense of the various ages of fable.  "Fabula docet et delectat!"  There are rather elaborate initials but no illustrations.  Even a magnifying glass could not help me to decipher the creature(s) pictured on the back cover!  A wide spectrum of fabulists is represented here!  The final element in the book before some advertisements is an AI which introduces each fabulist with a line and then lists his fables offered here.  I enjoyed trying a sampling from five across the ages.  Konrad von Würzburg (35) has the ape asking the fox for his tail, since he has no "Dach" to cover his posterior.  The answer remains "no."  Ludwig Holberg (78) has a man correcting the ape's representation of the animal view that the fox is the cleverest animal; the man explains that one should not mistake trickiness for wisdom.  Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim (103) presents a conversation between the gardener and a bee.  "Some flowers have poison, but you draw from them all."  The bee answers "Yes.  I leave the poison there."  Henrich von Kleist's "Fabel ohne Moral" (151) has a man address his saddled horse: "If I had only known you in the state of Nature!  But they have taught you arts of which I know nothing.  I would have to encounter you in the racetrack if we were to come to know each other!"  A Turkish fable (173) has a dervish preaching at length to a wolf about morality.  The wolf urges him to finish, since there is a herd of sheep pasturing nearby, and he would hate to miss a chance at grabbing one!  Wolfdietrich Schnurre offers "Schuld" on 204.  When the time of men had passed, the animals held trials for those who had served men.  One animal after another cites what he did against humans.  Finally the cricket says "I sang at his hearth."  All the animals cry out "Guilty!"

I visited Heidelberg early and late in this trip to Europe.  During the early stop, I came by Hassbecker's but found nothing.  The woman who has always been so friendly and helpful said that she would look for me and that I should stop back.  I did happen to be in the territory three weeks later and stopped by to find this lovely little book of about eighteen pages.  Its first unusual characteristic is that the pages feel more like plastic than paper.  They are probably great for little people who might want to eat books or eat on them!  The version is touching, starting from the mouse's natural curiosity.  "Ausnahmsweise" is the heart of the lion's answer to the mouse's desperate plea.  One of the best images of this fetching book is that of the mouse's hole, out of which he hears the lion's roaring.  Curiosity is again the key: he wants to know what is behind the roaring.  For the major actions of this version of the story, there are several other mice watching what this mouse does.  There is no attempt in this version to make the lion and mouse companions or even friends beyond these events.  But the point has already been made, "dass auch ein Mäuschen einem Löwen helfen kann."

This is one of two die-cut booklets found by chance at Powell's.  The superhuman helper here is "un espíritu de las aguas" with long white hair and beard.  The fortunate woodchopper meets "un compañero on the way back home.  When this fellow repeats the woodchopper's action and then lies about the golden hatchet, the spirit tells him that he is lying and orders him to go find it himself.  16 pages, stiff covers, adequate color illustrations.  These booklets sat on my shelf for five years waiting to be catalogued.

I was surprised to stumble upon this large -format, 126 page magazine.  It brings together various contributions "unmediated" by advertising.  All sorts of creative endeavors are represented here, including plenty of loose sheets presenting art.  I wondered why Aesop's name was chosen for this outpouring of and support for artistic activity -- until I discovered on the foundation's website that Esopus is named for a creek in the Catskill Mountains that empties into the Hudson.  The name thus has nothing to do with the ancient storyteller.  "Named after a vibrant creek that runs through New York's Catskill Mountains, Esopus is a cultural stream, free of advertising and commercial influence."  I keep it in the collection to forewarn any future fable researcher wondering if he or she needs to dig for treasure in this field!

Here is one of some 38 inexpensive Turkish editions of Aesop bought together.  This book is extremely simple: from 5 to 95 there is a fable per page without illustration.  A final page offers advertising.  There is no T of C or introductory material.  The front cover presents a colored image of many animals in a jungle setting.

I am so glad to see a publisher take up Barboutau's classic work published in the mid 1890's and reproduce it well, as this large and impressive volume does.  The detailed work of the skilled Japanese artists is able to stand up to the expansion of the illustrations.  The details still look good.  This book also solves a problem in the Japanese first editions, namely that the illustrations spread across two pages, and some of the artistry in the very center of the two pages was not visible.  Here a sturdy spine enables a viewer to see the full image.  Among my favorites from this viewing are: "The Blind and the Lame" (16-17); "The Mole and the Rabbits" (32-33); "The Phoenix" (52-53); "The Dervish, Crow, and Falcon" (60-61); "The Two Bald Men" (72-73); and "The Rabbit and the Duck" (80-81).  The three artists are acknowledged for their specific contributions on 127.

This is a particularly heartwarming discovery.  As its colophonic page describes, it is printed for the sole use of the club's members and is not distributed for sale.  The club is apparently passionate about Etienne Le Rallic (1891-1968) -- and for good reason.  I have enjoyed his work in a number of inexpensive editions associated with the publishers' names Gordinne and Touret.  Le Rallic has a typical signature that was not easy for me to decipher.  I must have three or four guesses at it sitting around in my reports on these numerous finds.  Le Rallic did 35 fables for Charles Gordinne in 1935 and Gordinne apportioned them out in volumes he published between 1935 and 1938.  They also appeared in an album put out by René Touret along with three larger designs.  There is a lovely cover image here bringing together a collection of fable images.  The album itself features fables with black-and-white renditions of Le Rallic's illustrations.  I am only sorry that they could not have done the whole album in color!  8¼" x 11¾".  "Seul l'album permet de fair perdurer l'oeuvre d'un illustrateur."  I count 38 full-page black-and-white illustrations in this album.  Curiously the colophonic page at the beginning is repeated at the end.  Might there be a missing pair of large colored illustrations?  Or perhaps I misunderstand "avec trois grand dessins couleurs repris dan cet album, l'un au premier plat avec le titre, les deux autres à l'antérieur."

Here is one of the strangest books I have encountered in a long time.  The introduction seems widely informed but may interpret the history of "Aesop" quite heavily.  About 70 fables are recounted in this large-format (9" x 11") paperback book of 80 pages.  The narratives are quite traditional, but the art and layout are wild.  Some elements that I can put my finger on are surrealism, English words, artistic motifs from India, a face of Elvis, a face of Jesus.  I look through and often am unsure what I am seeing.  There is, for example the frightening image on XXXVII of "The Drunk and His Wife."  There is the strong image on XLI of "The Lion and the Man."  Are those recollections of a Madonna and Child in "The Thief and His Mother" (LV)?  Why does OF appear twice (VII and LXXIV)?  And what is going on on LXV?  The publisher's website excerpts this portion of the introduction: "Esope, c’est un bestiaire aux personnages tour à tour innocents, rusés, tout puissants, qui va refléter la société humaine jusqu’au Moyen-Age et au Roman de Renart, jusqu’à ce que la Fable, en tant que poème l’emporte sur les isopets, de Clément Marot à Jean Anouilh. Un monde cruel, politique, ou le plus rusé triomphe, où il ne fait pas bon être innocent. En cela, les fables d’Esope restent toujours d’une grande actualité."

Here is a large format (9" x 12½") presentation of fables grouped by animal.  There are thirteen groupings.  Most get a two-page spread, with some factual material about the animal with photographs besides the three or four fable illustrations, whose maker seems to be unacknowledged.  Lion, dog, fox, and wolf get four pages each.  The artistic style is already indicated in the cover illustration of LM, where the eyes of the mouse are exaggerated as he peers down from a place between the lion's ears.  If one feels the surface of this cover and lets light reflect off it, one sees that the paint is thickly applied.  Perhaps the most typical of the illustrations is "The Lion and the Mosquito" (8), which emphasizes the eyes of the now caught mosquito in the foreground and the blood on the face of the lion.  Morals for the fables are separated and in a different color.  Might "Mundo Animal" be a series on animals?

I was happily surprised to find a Spanish copy of this fine work in my pilgrimage visit to Powell's.  I find one major change from the English edition: GA is not presented.  I will modify accordingly here what I wrote about the English edition of the same year.  This work is a triumph!  It is wonderful!  Four fables follow this pattern: a single fable gets a major pop-up in the center of its two pages.  The early part of the story is in a small fold-out element in the lower left; the late part of the story is in a small fold-out element in the lower right.  A moral occurs in a small paper-ploy in the upper right.  This can be a level or a pop-up or another little use of the pop-up's possibilities.  After three of these and before the last one is a different element.  It has WS at its center; arranged around it are four other stories.  In each, one lifts the cover to find a smaller fold-out that tells the story.  The five major stories are GGE, FC, TH, and LM.  The smaller stories around WS are DS, TB, FG, and "The Horse and the Stag."  Special prizes go to: the lower-right scene in FC, in which we can see the cheese dropping from the crow's mouth towards the fox; the lower-left opening scene in LM, which has the lion dangling the mouse in the air; and the upper-left story of DS, which includes a mirror in which we, like the dog, can see the bigger bone in the water.  Most impressive construction among the four main stories might be FC.  The crow and tree tower up further and further as the book is opened.  Unfortunately, WS is told in the poorer version.  This book is a genuine treasure.

I was all set to record this book as a duplicate of one listed under 2011/2013 when I noticed that this is described not as "1a editión, 1a reimpressión" but simply as "1a editión."  So I give it a separate record.  Curiously the same verso of the title page describes it as printed in April of 2012.  Let me give the same description that I gave then.  Here are twelve traditional fables each given about four pages and each graced with a full-page colored illustration.  The first fable has an ant ask "Help me!" to some six characters, asking to get away.  Snow, sun, cloud, wind, wall, and man give answers indicating that they are indeed strong but unable to help.  Each passes the ant on to the next, saying that the next is stronger.  I believe the ant finally takes off on her own.  She will help herself.  In GA, the grasshopper makes music with maracas!  There is a partial-page transition getting into the first story and others transitioning to each next new story.  This frame story has a fox and an ant telling each other the stories.  Further stories include AD; SW; "The Mother, Wolf, and Child"; MM, GGE, TMCM; LM; "The Lion and His Advisors" (and the skunk); "The Weasel and the Bats"; and "The Bat and Nightingale."  The maracas picture on 15 might be the most engaging.  TMCM on 41 is also charming: the cat looks around a curtain at one observant and one inattentive eating mouse.

Fifteen Aesopic tales told in English for children knowing Hebrew.  Each fable's presentation includes at least one full-colored illustration, vocabulary footnotes, and several exercises.  There is a T of C at the front.  There are also some handwritten annotations.  The best illustration might be that of the cat waiting at the mouse-hold with one eye open (9).  About 6½" x 9½".  64 pages.  The front cover features a picture of a farming couple and a goose nesting over several golden eggs.

This book is almost identical with another in the collection published by the same press and the same artist a year earlier.  What has changed?  The cover color and illustration -- from FS to TH -- and the ISBN number.  The surprise for me in investigating the difference is that there is now a third book published in 2014 by the same publisher and artist with yet a different cover and ISBN number!  As I wrote of the 2010 edition, this is the latest in a long line of lovely illustrated French editions of fables for children.  Contemporary technology and artistic ability combine for pictures that are colorful and exact.  It all starts with a cover that offers a lively scene of tortoise and hare, clothed and gendered, walking along a path by a field.  Forty fables receive one-to-three fine illustrations each.  One of my favorites is "The Stag and the Pool" (20-21); this illustration spreads beautifully across two pages.  In "The Lion Become Old" (40-41), the ass is climbing onto the lion's body to deliver his insulting blow.  AD has a whimsical illustration in which the ant is riding like a horseback rider on the dove (45).  I will answer my own earlier question now: The illustration on 71 belongs to the present fable, "The Spider and the Swallow" but carries over the mosquito from the preceding fable, "The Lion and the Mosquito."  Another favorite of mine shows the weasel and rabbit pleading all sorts of logic before the bespectacled cat (88).  Little do they realize that they are both about to get eaten!  Let me mention two last favorites.  A two-page spread suggests the maliciousness of the frog in FM as he is about to plunge the rat into the water (114-15); the final page shows the scene from above as the hawk carries both away.  My impression is that Salembier has borrowed heavily from French illustration history and used other people's framing of scenes as she has created her own realization within that framing.

Here is the long awaited sequel to a wonderful book of fables.  The format remains the same, though the fascinating sidebars seem less frequent.  For me, nothing can compare with the original Woods "Kalila and Dimna," but this is a fine successor.  It seems harder to keep track of the story's point in this version, but that may have been my experience during a first reader of "Volume One."  The convolutions of stories here are intense!  My favorite little story after a first reading is "Bleeding Dead Men::  A madman is firmly convinced that he is dead.  People and doctors try to convince him that he is alive.  Finally one doctor asks "Do dead men bleed?"  "No."  The doctor quickly pricks him. The Madman reacts: "By God, dead men do bleed!"!  I learned of this book when one of my students bought it by mistake and was trying to follow my page references, which were of course to "Volume One." 

This is a curious square book presenting a Disneyesque version of GA.  It seems to be the first in a collectible series of books that arrived by mail, but I cannot find records of other books in the collection.  The endpapers feature a variety of characters who might well figure in fable books, like the hare wearing a runner's number.  To judge from the bibliographical information facing the title-page, it took a small army to produce this book and sell it all over Europe!  While it was not easy to establish simple things like "Who wrote this version?" and "Who illustrated it?" and "When?" it does seem that www.altaya.fr is overall responsible.  From what I can learn on the web, altaya and Disney may be two parts of one enterprise.  After two pages given to presenting La Fontaine's fable, we find "La Fable pour les enfants."  It is summertime, and the grasshopper plays his violin as ants trudge by with sacks over their shoulders.  As in Disney's version, the leading ant -- earlier a queen but now "la fourmi la plus sage" -- has pity on the frozen grasshopper.  He declares himself repentant.  This ant declares that the grasshopper will work: he will amuse the ants with his singing, playing, and dancing.  The grasshopper's song says that we have to sing, laugh, dance, and also work.  Further, we should never make fun of those who come to our aid.  Everyone has different talents and they are all precious.  And it is better to do things together.  The rest of the book helps students learn about grasshoppers, ants, and playing together.

We already have a smaller 2013 copy of this book in the collection; this 2011 copy is missing its CD.  As I wrote there, "Un conte écrit et raconté par Anne Roumanoff d'après les Fables de La Fontaine."  This 32-page landscape-formatted book presents another extensive and engaging contemporary adaptation of La Fontaine's fable with delightful animal figures.  Huluberlue La Tortue does everything slowly while Phildebert Le Lièvre hurries through everything.  Even their respective families follow the same patterns.  Huluberlue spends months training under a kind coach from school and, in a big race, she does well enough while Phildebert underestimates her and loses.  The last pages offer La Fontaine's fable with helps and questions.  This is the second of Roumanoff's adaptations that we are lucky enough to include in the collection.  Not the least virtues of this book are the lively illustrations and the wonderfully concrete sense of what kids actually do!

Here is a quick summary from the website of the publisher Ex Machina:  "Extensively illustrated and presenting many new documents, this book recounts the journey taken by Ex Machina’s creative team, from Vietnam to France and even Quebec. The reader is invited behind the scenes of a fascinating production where opera meets with puppet art. Winner of the Claude-Rostand Prize awarded by the Syndicat de la critique en France for best lyrical production created outside Paris (Aix-en-Provence), The Nightingale and Other Short Fables, a collage of some of Igor Stravinsky’s works, is praised everywhere with equal enthusiasm since its debut in Toronto in October 2009."  This unusual booklet is apparently something of a souvenir program then for an opera of the same title.  Chapters present the musical, literary, scenic, and cultural background.  The musical background is a collage of some of Igor Stravinsky's works, including ""Le Rossignol," "Renard," "Fables," and "Ragtime."  At least some of the action is played out in silhouette and at least some by puppets.  The cultural background seems to involve both Vietnam and China.  Perhaps I will sometime have a chance to view a performance!

Here is a book in series with another that I have already, "Les Fables de La Fontaine pour réfléchir," published one year earlier by the same company.  Like that book, this book is fun!  The drawing for DLS has a frightened lamb on one side of the donkey but a fox pulling off the lion-skin on the other (8).  Here each of twenty-six Aesopic fables gets two pages, as is indicated in the T of C on 4-5.  The first page presents the text and a humorous half-page colored illustration of the fable.  In "The Old Lion and the Fox," for example, the fox stands outside the open mouth of a lion embedded in a mountain and surveys the bones and skeletons strewn about in front of this portal.  The second page presents a case under the title "Par exemple," followed by a complicating comment ""Oui, mais."  Last come a "conclusion" and a verbal game.  Mazzari's illustrations are delightful!  Good examples are SW (18); the farmer lighting the fox's tail on fire (24); "The Rabbits and the Frogs" (32); "The Dove and the Ant" (52); and "The Tortoise and the Eagle" (56).  This is again great imaginative work!

Here is a large-format (9" x 13") book presenting twenty fables with eight pages for each.  The poetry text page at the beginning of each fable is formatted to look like a familiar old book with worn hinges.  There are then prose texts along with the illustrations for each story. The colored art is done in broad strokes, sometimes taking a whole page, like the crow on 14, and sometimes smaller portions, like the mouse held by the lion on 19.  The art might even be called primitive in the non-pejorative sense.  Perrette goes through a significant sequence of emotions that are well pictured in MM (26-31).  The artist gives us a good sense of La Fontaine's perception of the beginning of the TH race:  the hare rests with a cocktail in a lawn chair while the race starts and the tortoise moves off (45).  The frog in OF is a diminutive slender female who wants to put on weight.  The ox recommends the "balloon" method to fill out, and she falls in love with the method!  The approach of this art is especially appropriate, I believe, for TMCM, which is well presented (80-87).  One of the best illustrations presents the wolf and lamb either as mirrored in the water or as seen from below the water-line (125).  The front cover, the pre-title-page, and the back cover all bring together various characters from the fables in three different designs.  Among the many big, inexpensive fable books that appear in France year after year, this is a favorite.  T of C at the beginning.

Here is a surprising book.  This paperback, almost square in format, presents original fables by Çlirim Muça, whose published works include "Cento e una favola."  Seventy-two pages present thirty-three fables, each in a two-page spread including on the left a rough painting and on the right both an Italian and an English text.  The paintings are in an unusual style somewhere between linocut and finger-painting.  The fables are good contemporary attempts at animal fables.  In only one case do I find Muça employing a traditional fable quite intact.  "Forgiveness" on 35 is the standard story of confessed mortal sinners including the lion punishing the peccadillo-committing donkey.  I find several fables quite fetching.  "The Donkey and His Friends" (9) has the donkey teased because he has to work hard to carry water for major feasts.  He says that he feels bad until he comes back to the stable to find that the calf, pig, and sheep are no longer there.  The young elephant overthrows the old king elephant and has the scene carved on his tusks.  The old elephant returns and fights, and the usurper's carved tusks break (47).  A fox changes jobs and conducts a survey by telephoning the hare, who graciously describes "her favorite tunnel, her dietary habits and her leisure time" (55).  The next morning the fox shows up outside the hare's favorite tunnel and eats her!  The translation falls down a couple of times: a man and a fox "met one again" (41) and a rabbit on 71 asks a fox "How did you found me out?"  That story, of a rabbit in a lion's skin, has in my opinion a slim chance of working.

Here is a large-format (9½" by 11¾") book presenting all 100 of the hand-colored engravings done by Chagall.  This publication has helped me understand one more step in the process of Chagall illustrating La Fontaine.  He hand-colored some 85 sets of the 200 engravings published by Teriade in 1952.  Goldmark got possession of one of the folios of those 85, and they are selling them off with this catalogue.  Every one of the 100 hand-colored engravings is represented here, whether in a full-page illustration or a group of four or a group of nine.  The average price of each of these hand-colored engravings seems to be in excess of £3000.  I still do not understand well what these colored engravings have to do with the gouaches that he started with back in the 20's, but that is okay.  I understand more now.  This edition chooses to offer, at its end, the texts of Elizur Wright for each of these fables.  One could have done a lot worse!  The representation of the illustrations is fine.  I am happy to have found this book!

"Un conte écrit et raconté par Anne Roumanoff d'après les Fables de La Fontaine."  This 32-page landscape-formatted book with CD presents another extensive and engaging contemporary adaptation of La Fontaine's fable with delightful animal figures.  Marie-Chantal and Eugénie are childhood friends who go off to medical school and live together.  Their habits are so different by now that they go separate ways.  After months of negligence, Marie-Chantal faces an exam.  Hungry and abandoned, she goes to her old friend to ask for help.  Eugénie calls on her friends Scott La Marmotte and Victor le Castor to create a team that tutors Marie-Chantal for a week.  Eugénie, Scott, and Castor come in first, second, and third on the exam, respectively.  Marie-Chantal is 668th but she passes.  "Quand on veut, on peut."  And "Trop travailler, ça n'est pas bien, mai trop s'amuser, ça n'est pas bien non plus."  The last pages offer La Fontaine's fable with helps and questions.  This is the third of Roumanoff's adaptations that we are lucky enough to include in the collection.  Not the least virtues of this book are the lively illustrations and the wonderfully concrete sense of what kids actually do!

I had time between trains in Washington, DC, and went bumming around the station.  To my surprise, I found a used book shop.  I decided to plunge into their children's books and actually found four fable books!  And I paid a whopping $5.25 for them all.  Here is one of my finds.  This 30-page pamphlet is "based on the bestselling books by John Grogan."  Marley barks too much, whether it is because of a passing dog or a mailman.  He barks when he wants to play, and even jumps on Cassie's lap.  The family chastises Marley for barking too much.  "Do you have to bark at every little thing?"  When Marley disturbs Daddy by barking at a squirrel, Daddy promises not to come if Marley barks again.  Marley hangs his head.  He has wanted the family not to miss anything.  He tries not to bark, but then Baby Louie crawls out the door and toward the gate.  Marley does not bark but he tries to run circles around Louie.  When Louie gets out the gate, Marley barks.  Daddy yells "Be quiet!"  In the end, Daddy and the family thank Marley for barking.  The story is a clever redoing of the fable of the dog who cried wolf.  This contemporary story makes the same point as the fable. 

Here is a copy of the first printing of the first edition of the paperback book.  The hardbound edition was published in 2010.  The author declares in the introduction that he wanted to know more about Aesop before retelling Aesop's stories.  The information he found led him to wonder "what might have happened if Aesop had started up his own business, running a stall in the agora (that's Greek for marketplace), doing what he loved best -- entertaining people and telling fables?" (5).  I am glad that he goes on to declare that "the stories have something to say to people of all ages, grown-ups and children alike."  He goes on to tell ten of Aesop's stories -- but, true to his purpose, he situates each first in a fictional situation in the agora.  Aesop is selling olives and cheese and inviting people "Stop for a moment -- and enjoy!"  The key in telling his first story, LM, is the line in which he asks his audience "You're too small,  You're too slow.  You're too ugly..  Has anyone ever told you that?  And then used it to keep you from doing something you really wanted to do?" (7).  Hartman follows up by including this in the last lines of this fable: "Don't let anyone judge you by the way you look" (11).  For me, the human illustrations -- and especially those of Aesop -- are even more engaging than the good illustrations of the animals in the fables.  In the middle of CP, Aesop forces his listeners to go find pebbles that they can put into his jar.  "We can't finish the story until we have pebbles" (14).  For FG, Aesop and his listeners watch what happens at a neighboring stall, where two women want the same amphora.  Aesop wisely proclaims "This is even better than a story, I'd say" (17).  Of course the two handles break off and the pottery seller demands payment.  One woman says "It wasn't that nice, anyway!"  For TMCM, Aesop claims to sell peace.  Indeed, he says, I am the richest man in Greece!  Aesop goes on to tell the tale of the dung-beetle and the ant, with rain instead of snow.  "You can't always count on kindness" (27).  Flattery from the crowd enjoying his stories provokes Aesop to tell FC.  DS gets introduced when a dog runs through the crowd with a piece of stolen meat.  For non-human illustrations, try DW on 46-47.  My!  This is Aesop after my own heart!

Here is a Portuguese version of a pamphlet we have in French.  The pamphlet offers delightful cartoons, starting with the front-cover's contrast of the large lion in business suit and overcoat with the mouse in turtleneck and simple pants.  First La Fontaine's fable is told in its entirety in Portuguese.  Then we start putting the story into a context for today by taking a few lines at a time, creating a contemporary narrative, and giving these lines a two-page picture.  Rodolfo, the "riche homme d'affaires," is being chauffeured through the city in his grand limousine as Miguel, the vagabond, tries to cross the road with his shopping cart and fast-food bag.  Which of the two has more need of the other?  The limo hits Miguel.  Rodolfo takes Miguel into his limo, gives him a hot drink, and offers him a job.  Miguel goes to work in Rodolfo's car wash.  One afternoon, Rodolfo is on his way to the bank with the day's proceeds when he is robbed by a gang of elephants.  Miguel responds to Rodolfo's cries for help.  His shadow is so frightening that the robbers flee.  Miguel now shares Rodolfos desk, apparently as a partner in the firm.  The last pages have plenty of good information about both animals and also good questions to ponder.  First edition 2007.  Second re-impression 2011.

96 pages.   8¼" x 11⅜".  A colorful rainbow spectrum adorns the soft cover of this pedagogical book.  I would have enjoyed using this book as a teacher of pupils or students learning Latin.  There is plenty of help here for student and teacher, from games and puzzles to good philological and grammatical explanations and exercises.   My impression is that the authors are trying to give teachers everything they might use in helping students to understand a generous handful of Phaedrus' fables.  Am I to understand that Phaedrus is a standard part of Latin learning in German schools?

This little book of 18 pages is remarkable for its humanization of the animal characters.  The tortoise is like a little hunchback housed in a ball!  A giraffe wears four high-top roller-skates under a kind of mini-skirt with leggings.  Brun pays attention to the shoes each of her characters would wear, from the hare's sneakers to the tortoise's slippers.  Séassau has prepared a prose version of the story that fits well with the illustrations.  Once the race is announced, specific animals busy themselves with the preparations.  True to La Fontaine, Séassau has the tortoise linger at the starting point with a flower-stem in his mouth. I appreciate Séassau's short summary: "To show his contempt, he began a little siesta."  The tortoise makes the fable's last comment as she notices the frustrated hare: "And what if you had to carry your house?!"  A last page presents La Fontaine's fable on a single page.  Well done!

This engaging large-format 64-page book for children starts with a preamble: "Princes Who Wouldn't Learn."  There follow five chapters, each containing a story about the three princes created by Gavin and a story from one of the five chapters.  I remember the order as different in the Panchatantra itself, but the five chapters here are Gaining Friends, Losing Friends, Loss of Gains, Rash Deeds, and The Art of Duplicity.  Gavin is gentler in the preamble than the original.  Sarma says that the king may, if Sarma has failed to educate the king's unruly sons within six months, "make him a laughingstock."  I do believe that the original says that the king may show him the regal butt!  Sarma says "They are not stupid.  They just need awakening."  In the first chapter, the three sullen boys fly a kite but lose it to a fighter-kite, equipped with sharp glass.  Sarma tells them the story of the doves caught in a net.  In this version, Crow warns the King of the Doves, but the latter thinks it a crow's trick. In this version, the King's friend is Mole.  In a return to the story of the kite-stealer, the three boys need the help of the girl Preeta, who is ready to climb the tree and rescue their kite.  By the end of this adventuresome story, the boys proclaim "We did it together!"  "Even princes need friends" (21).  "Losing Friends" then offers the traditional Panchatantra story of the lion who destroys his friend the bull.  The contemporary story starts with a jealous cousin, Kanu, watching Preeta -- now a favorite of the three princes -- washing a buffalo.  In the Panchatantra story for this second frame, the buffalo is named Lively.  A key sentence here is "It's so hard, when you're a prince, to know who your real friends are, isn't it?" (26).  In this Kalila and Dimna portion of the work, the two jackals are "Wily" (Dimna) and "Wary" (Kalila).  In this version, Wary goes with Wily to visit the buffalo making frightening noises.  Wily tells King Lion that the bellowing comes from Shiva's own bull!  Gavin does a good job of telescoping the step-by-step doubt of each other in Ramsay Wood's version.  This version gets the two doubting each other quickly.  Wary objects along the way and Wily answers "This is statecraft.  All statecraft is crooked" (32).  Frame Three is "Loss of Gains," and it leads to the story of the ape and the crocodile.  In this version, the crocodile wife dreams that eating the monkey's heart will give her and her husband eternal life.  Hideous Jaws at the key point knows that he has Redface in his power and wants to give him "a chance to make his peace with God."  Curiously, Hideous Jaws' wife is killed while he is returning to Redface's home to get his "real heart."  Frame Four is "Rash Deeds."  The youngest prince kills the monkey faithful to him out of suspicion.  Sarma tells the story of the mongoose and wife. This wife kills the faithful mongoose who had protected her son.  In Frame Five, The Art of Duplicity, Kanu's behavior becomes more and more suspect.  Sarma tells "Owls and Crows," in which a Sinon-like crow sets the owls up for a disastrous defeat.  Willey creates a variety of art objects to accompany the stories.  Several of the early images strike me as perhaps too soft for this story. I start to follow the artist's lead when I see the doves caught in the net (16).  The best image may be on 32-33, where King Lion has attacked Lively with the two jackals watching.

I see this booklet of three stories, each five pages long, as meant for children not much bigger than the 8½" x 11¾" book.  Three variations of the title-story strike me.  First, there is a discrepancy between the text, which has a courtier throwing nuts, and the illustrations, which have the courtier throwing coins, which are probably less likely to distract performing monkeys.  Secondly, the monkeys chasing the nuts take their clothes off.  Is that likely?  Thirdly, the courtier upsetting their act does not seem to have a purpose, and his effect is that the courtiers are amused.  Is not the nut-toss usually -- and more appropriately -- revenge from a displaced dancer?  Moral: "Nobody can put up an act forever."  "The Caged Bird and the Bat" rightly leads to its moral "Precautions are useless after a crisis."  "The Fox and the Goat" has another apparent discrepancy between text and illustration.  The text has the fox saying that there is going to be a drought.  The illustrations show a rainstorm happening throughout the story.  The goat here succumbs to the temptation to "save a little water for himself."  In this version, the fox immediately uses the goat without describing a plan to him first.  The large illustrations make the action clear to young minds.

The title-page continues "Based on ideas and drafts annotated in da Vinci's notebooks."  Ten fables appear here.  Leonardo's fables are excellent.  They are generally a bit longer than normal Aesopic fables.  The donkey that arrogantly disregards the ice soon enough sleeps on it, thaws that section of ice, and drowns.  He creates his own doom.  Soon the lake is again iced over, and no one knows the difference.  "The Walnut and the Belltower" (17) remains a favorite of mine.  Nicer than other similar books, this looks like another "printed upon demand" book done in La Vergne, TN.  This copy was printed just eleven days ago!

"When a classic fable meets this hare-brained retelling, the race is on!"  Kevin O'Malley does have fun with the story.  Lever Lapin is the talk of the world, and Nate Tortoise has had enough of it, especially when Lever shows up at a restaurant and gets Nate's table, while Nate has to move to a table near the swinging kitchen door.  In the race, Lever stops at the restaurant, La Gaganspew, to chat with reporters and friends.  When Nate goes by, Lever cannot get through the crowd.  The headline in the paper the next day is "Better Nate Than Lever!"  The art is as much fun as the text.  Among the best illustrations are the first: Nate eats his meal at La Gaganspew but has to listen to women at a nearby table extolling Lever's great qualities. A special two-page spread is reserved for Lever's face during his interruption of the race.  "Gentlemen, it's only five dollars for my autograph.  And ladies, please, only one kiss for each of you."

Here is another large-format children's book that announces its zest with its catchy title.  The book sustains the energy.  The text is rhyming rap.  "Deep inside the city/ was a hip and happy hare./  He was zippy, sometimes lippy,/ takin' taxis everywhere."  The hare is plugged in and turned on.  "Way out in the country/ was a tortoise calm and cool./  He was quite the mellow fellow/ chillin' out beside the pool."  The illustration has the tortoise floating on his back in a pool, with a drink perched on his chest and a butterfly sitting on his nose.  Tortoise and hare literally bump into each other at the county fair.  Tortoise suggests a race.  The crowd at the starting line features pigs, sheep, and chickens.  Hare declares "I really hate to beat you but I must."  Hare stops for a picnic lunch under a tree.  Hare even presents a rock concert.  This event is labeled "groovy."  Was it only in his dreams?  Several animals have cameras at the finish-line.  As hare comes skidding in at the finish, tortoise pops his head out of the shell and wins by a nose.  "'That was Groovy!  That was Fun!'  Hare said, 'Dude, I shoulda' won.'"  Now they are two buddies out in the country racing in the pool, where the tortoise says "I really hate to beat you but I must" and the hare urges him to chill out.  The illustrations are engaging and lively throughout.  The book's Chicago pride comes out in the first illustration, where the hare's cab has a punning "O'Hare Airport" sign.

I know and love Imai's work from her 2012 German "12 Fabeln von Aesop," done also in English in 2013.  This book of just one fable does not disappoint.  Its simplicity echoes the good of the Country Mouse's life.  Country Mouse wears a simple vest, while Town Mouse has a striped vest and tie.  One great picture has the Country Mouse balancing a dish on his head as he serves up multiple platters of simple food.  This version puts special emphasis on cheese as part of the sumptuous meal left for the two in town.  When the first human intruder appears as a shadow, the Town Mouse is just climbing a ladder up a Swiss cheese.  A double-page near the story's end dramatizes their choices well as one mouse goes off left and the other right.  A final page needs no words to show the Country Mouse's peaceful enjoyment at home.  Of course he is eating cheese!

"Un conte écrit et raconté par Anne Roumanoff d'après les Fables de La Fontaine."  This 32-page landscape-formatted book presents an extensive and engaging contemporaruy adaptation of La Fontaine's fable with delightful animal figures.  Yongu Théo is a "ne'er do well" dropout child who lands, to his disgust, working for Monsieur Chèvre, a maker of cheese.  He has a dream of creating a world-class chese, and his boss gives him eight days in the cheese cave to give his dream a try.  Théo's "Corbasson" cheese, heart-shaped, is an instant wild hit.  After some delightful ins and outs, the plot of Maître Renard, master of an industrail-size cheese factory, is foiled in his attempt to flatter Théo's recipe out of him.  There is a happy ending here for Théo and his family.  The last pages offer La Fontaine's fable with helps and questions.  There was a CD which is no longer present.  I am happy to learn that Anne Roumanoff created at least four other such adaptations of La Fontaine.  I have ordered them and look forward to enjoying them.

Pinyin, I am learning, is the official phonetic system for transcribing the Mandarin pronunciations of Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet in the People's Republic of China.  That is just what this book presents: three Roman letters above each character in Chinese.  As the opening T of C (6-7) shows, there are here some ninety-nine fables on 143 pages.  Colorful illustrations adorn part of a page, take a whole page, or even take a two-page spread.  Readers without Chinese will recognize many familiar Aesopic fables here.  Among the best illustrated are FM (12), GA (21), "The Eagle and the Beetle" (42), SW (45-47), "The Astronomer" (58), TB (71), FWT (83), TH (85), CJ (91), FG (93), FS (107-8), WC (119), and MM (141).  My prize among all these goes to TB.  In 2001, the Chinese Ministry of Education designated this book as one of the compulsory readings for Chinese.

Here is a slender book of 48 pages presenting six fables after an introduction and before a last word "Esopo se calló."  The introduction presents Aesop as talking to a group of children in ancient Greece.  First up in his stories is the traditional FC, with the subtitle "(La fábula que todos conocemos)."  Nettling questions from the children follow: "Do you know whether crows actually eat cheese?"  "Were there other animals around during this encounter?"  "Might they have helped one or the other character?"  My sense from the Spanish is that in an anti-fable Aesop changes the story, so that all the animals end up happy to be sharing the crow's cheese. So it goes through six stories, including DS, where the dog gets a piece of meat falling from a passing truck.  Other fables include "The Fisherman and the Fish in Hand"; "The Dog and the Crocodile"; and "The Shepherd and the Sheep."  The fourth fable is hard for me to decipher.  Does it concern a man meeting a ghost-woman?  In each case, there is a partial-page lively design for the traditional fable and a full-page for the anti-fable.  The conclusion of it all, by the way, is that Aesop decides that his next audience will have no participants who are ingenious, critical, intelligent, or impressionable "like a child."

Here is a simple story about learning social behavior.  Joey joins Howard's class but irritates everyone and destroys the class's good atmosphere.  Howard befriends Joey and recommends that Joey imitate the chameleons by adapting himself to whatever the other children are doing.  The suggestion works and the class has its peace back.  Howard's two new chameleons seem also to be pals as they peek out from Howard and Joey's pockets.  Joey seems to be a little tiger and Howard a bunny.  There is a series of Howard B. Wigglebottom books.

Here are twelve traditional fables each given about four pages and each graced with a full-page colored illustration.  The first fable has an ant ask "Help me!" to some six characters, asking to get away.  Snow, sun, cloud, wind, wall, and man give answers indicating that they are indeed strong but unable to help.  Each passes the ant on to the next, saying that the next is stronger.  I believe the ant finally takes off on her own.  She will help herself.  In GA, the grasshopper makes music with maracas!  There is a partial-page transition getting into the first story and others transitioning to each next new story.  This frame story has a fox and an ant telling each other the stories.  Further stories include AD; SW; "The Mother, Wolf, and Child"; MM, GGE, TMCM; LM; "The Lion and His Advisors" (and the skunk); "The Weasel and the Bats"; and "The Bat and Nightingale."  The maracas picture on 15 might be the most engaging.  TMCM on 41 is also charming: the cat looks around a curtain at one observant and one inattentive eating mouse.

There are forty-three chapters in this 5¾" x 8" book, each presenting an Aesopic fable.  About a quarter of the fables are illustrated with either a full page or a half-page black-and-white illustration.  I am frankly surprised to see a children's book these days using black-and-white illustrations!  One of the best of the illustrations is FG (13), but the cover gives a better colored rendition of this good scene.  Another good illustration shows the farmer trying unsuccessfully to make peace with the snake which he has offended (50).  A final good illustration takes a different view of a frequently presented scene by presenting the donkey in a lion's skin face-on.  We see the mane around a donkey's face (56).  Check out "The Fox and the Cat" (93).  This story may be unusually well told.

Barnes and Noble did a "Classic Edition" in 2003 that presented V.S. Vernon Jones' and Arthur Rackham's Aesop.  Now here is a new effort by Barnes and Noble, nicely done.  Griset's illustrations, so often dark and poorly printed, are well presented here.  I have tried to pin the texts down to a known author, but I cannot find the source, and there is none acknowledged here.  Of course one great advantage of this book is that it is inexpensive.  Where does one find a well-bound book with a dust-jacket for $6.98?  Further, the book has a good introduction and good suggestions for pursuing study of Aesop.  There are notes and an AI at the end of the fables, besides a list of illustrations and a chronology at the book's beginning.  Here is its biggest surprise: it refers twice to the Carlson Fable Collection!  In fact, this collection gets the book's first footnote, and it comes with the book's first sentence!  The note itself is on 231.  Readers are also referred to the collection on 239 when Clayton discusses presentations of fables in other media.

As so often happens, I presumed that this paperback book of 28 pages was a duplicate of something already in the collection.  As so often happens, I was wrong.  Square Fish is the publisher now, which is described on the back cover as an imprint of MacMillan, even though the title page still has Henry Holt and Company after Square Fish.  I still enjoy the title-page's monkey-artist sitting on a book and creating a pen-and-ink sketch of a dandy fox.  This monkey comes complete with beret and scarf!  This copy means that I have been finding Michael Hague Aesop books for thirty-five years!

As far as I can tell, this book does not even admit who published it!  It contains 81 fables on 166 pages.  In all but one respect, it is a quintessential print-upon-demand book using the earlier efforts of others.  That singular respect is the egregious misspelling of Aesop twice on the cover, despite getting the name correct regularly inside the book and on the back cover.  Somebody was sound asleep!  The book's xerox-like illustrations, lifted from Tenniel or Tenniel-Wolfe, are supplemented by a black-and-white rendition of my favorite medieval rendering of "Esopus" with, I believe, a scholar's red cap.  There is a T of C at the front of the book.

There is an advantage in doing lots of cataloguing in a short space of time.  This book invited me to enjoy that advantage.  As I looked it over, I was struck by the images: I had seen them before.  Some checking brought me to Om's 2018 book "Aesop's Fables: All-time Favourite Stories: Large Print Story Book."  I believe that the visual work throughout the two books is identical.  Another quick check shows that this is our first book in Hindi, our 72nd language in the collection.  As I wrote there, the visual and textual approaches to the stories are simple.  TT begins with another fable, in which Zeus condemns the tortoise to carry his house.  The two ducks carry not only the tortoise on their long stick, but a suitcase and a basket of fish.  I am not sure I have ever heard "The Fox, the Donkey, and the Lion" told this way.  The betraying fox offers the donkey to the lion and leads the donkey into a pit.  The lion then, as usually, devours the fox but, in this case, then frees the donkey.  82 pages.  7½" by 9¼".  The 2018 English copy is a reprint of the original 2012 printing, the same year as this book's year of printing.

This book seems to be the third in a series of twenty books, thirteen of which present Aesop's fables.  That is surprising, since the book contains sixty fables.  Most series present only some one hundred fables; this series must be presenting 780 of them!  A special feature of this book is its purple titles and morals.  Also, each fable has an animated black-and-white cartoon.  There is a T of C on 5-7.  A test of the first few fables finds the tellings sometimes slipshod or at least curious.  In "The Monkeys and Their Mother" (10), the story goes out of its way to make the point that a neglected baby usually grows weak and dies.  In this case, he becomes strong.  There is no crisis and no flight from a predator.  The mother asks the weaker baby how he grew strong.  "I have a strong will to live."  Close enough, but the old fable is gone.  Similarly, Jupiter gives a strange answer to Minerva when she chooses the olive: "To avoid any quarrels, we chose trees that don't bear any fruits" (17).  I think the original fable stresses Athena's attention to effectiveness and practicality while other gods are attracted only to beauty.  Jupiter's strange comment undercuts the surprising wisdom of her choice.  The cover features a man in a boat with a snake, crow, and lamb on the shore.  The title-fable is on 27 and does not include either the lamb or the man in the boat.  The back cover lists the other volumes in the Shree Timeless Fables series.  Is that a bald Aesop on the title-page and in the cover's boat?

What an explosion of imagination!  The book presents twelve assemblages of old tools, parts, kitchen utensils, and sheer junk!  The foreword by MC Di Venanzio rightly proclaims of viewing one of these works "This is truly a magical moment."  These objects are indeed "something new, yet still recognizable to us all."  In the early pages, Rolfe talks about his art and his steps into bringing together his art form and Aesop's fables.  For me, the key is the moment when visual art wants and needs story.  For Rolfe, it was when a homage to Henri Rousseau "needed something more."  "The static lion-in-a-jungle image took on a new dimension, and the experience hooked me on Aesop's Fables" (9).  Rolfe creates his own versions of the stories.  I notice, for example, that his hare keeps falling back in the race to taunt the slow tortoise.  In MSA, not only the donkey but both father and son tumble into the water!  LM; DS; "The Rat and the Elephant"; WS; FA; FG; CP; TB; "The Kid and the Wolf"; and FK fill out the fable program.  WS and FK are my favorite illustrations.  Various pieces seem to be available in various forms, from the original boxes to woodblock replicas.  How lucky I was to find a stray copy of the book away from the fable books at Powell's late in my searching there this time through!

Here is a curious little book (6" x 8¼") of 158 pages with so many texts that the closing T of C needs eight pages.  The texts are a collection of all sorts of clever stories.  Generally these stories show good peasant wisdom, like "Wife and Mother" (27): "I would rather have happen to me what my wife thinks about when I travel than what my mother fears when I travel."  A good number of the stories are recognizable traditional fables, including the following:  "The Oak and the Pumpkin" (5); "The Dog and the Deer" (22);  "The Fox Divisor" (34); FC (41); BC (41); "The Tongue Is the Sweetest and the Bitterest" (44); "The Pilgrim Fox and the Cock" (58); GA (59); "The Miser Burying His Gold" (63); "The Camel Prefers the Level" (73); "The Pig and the Singing Wolf" (83, with an image); "The Dying Lion and the Donkey" (108); "The Nut and the Watermelon" (125, in which one usually finds a pumpkin); and "The Scorpion and the Frog" (149).  New to me but like some fables is "The Dying Defecating Ass" (111).  "The Snake and the Lark" (76) not only has one of the best images; that image is repeated on every text page.  The illustration style is distinctive, as is clear from the cover image of a blind man carrying a lantern.  He does it, of course, not so that he can see but so that others can see him.

TMCM is one of four stories here.  Both mice live happily out their days after the adventure of the story.  There is a lovely echo of TMCM, the third story, on the whole booklet's last page: two mice are eating a lovely-looking cake, just as they did on 28.  Two different people had interrupted their enjoying first some cheese and then the cake.  Cake is in fact the contrasting note of the story's last paragraph.  Country mouse never tasted cake again.  City mouse stayed among the dangers of the city.  He was "much too fond of cake to leave it behind."  The two mice are set off by tophat and neck kerchief.  Well done!

This book has a very pleasant history.  I found it by stopping in this children's bookshop in the Plöck in Heidelberg on my way elsewhere.  I was surprised to find a fable book I had not yet found in German.  Now as I review the book in Omaha, I have found out that it is a re-edition of the earlier "Wo Fuchs und Hase sich Gute Nacht sagen" from the same publisher in 2002.  A quick search found that book on sale on Ebay for almost the same price.  This is a case, then, of finding the later edition first and going back to the earlier one.  The book divides up its fifty fables by areas, starting with "Von Tieren im Wasser."  The range of stories includes Märchen as well as fables and extends to various kinds of stories and poems.  The array of authors is truly stunning!  I enjoy, for example, Goethe's poem "Die Frösche" (25).  Under the ice of the frozen pond, the frogs promised that, if they ever again got into the fresh air, they would sing like nightingales.  Spring came, they got into the open air, and "quakten wie vor alter Zeit."  I also enjoy Theodor Fontane's German version of "The Twa Corbies" (41).  Michl's art is various, from full double pages for titles of sections to various portions of pages with text.  The art is simple, big, bold, and sometimes appropriately playful, as in "Gruselett" (43).  Text and art are wonderfully matched in "Wettstreit" (46-47).  A great example of this book's playful character is Hans Adolf Halbey's untitled poem on 178 with its facing illustration.  It begins "Ein geapfelter Schimmel."  It is all here, from Aesop to Munro Leaf's "Ferdinand" (183).

Apparently the versions used in this book come from Jan Albin in the Prostejov anthology of 1557.  The book itself is unusual and engaging.  It presents 29 fables, each on a single page, the paper for which is almost the strength of cardboard stock.  Each fable thus gets three or four cartoon panels, with the animals shaped in an engaging geometric fashion, where necks are narrow dowels and faces are triangles or circles.  Two mice appear frequently in these panels – and then alone on the back cover.  The front cover presents a circle of animals.  Perhaps most curious is the lion, with a round face encircled with bristles.  The illustrations offer a delightful primitive style.  Among them, FC is well done (8).  Is the lion (10) offering the fox kingship?  FS features a great fox-face (13).  Signed by Hencl.  I am not sure that I have established who really published this engaging book!

This 96-page booklet offers work for pupils between eleven and sixteen years old toward understanding fables.  It centers work around twenty fables, with specified activities.  The pages are frequently the sort that a teacher would xerox for a class.  The texts chosen are appropriately simple and representative, and the illustrations are often taken from Ulm.  I would say that the work is carefully and effectively prepared.  I wish the American materials I learned from had been as well organized and as perceptive as this material is.  The back cover correctly praises the book's "Textvielfalt," "Methodienvielfalt," and "Freiarbeit."  That is, the texts come from a variety of sources, the ways of working with them are many and varied, and students can learn how not only to critique but also to generate fables.  The cover also claims correctly that the book offers well based help for the teacher in planning classes.

Here is one of the crazier books in this collection.  These rhymed verse fables with morals tend, I believe, toward positive advice on how to cope with the crazy situation of life.  An example might be "Commere la cigogne" (26-27).  As far as I can tell, the fable itself is broadly an argument on behalf of allowing single-sex marriages.  How much better to have two loving parents than to have two who are enemies!  The moral: "Let us quit judging good or evil.  Let's tend to see the good with some respect."  The art, always creative here, has a stork bringing a baby and then standing on top of a "No entry" sign.  The illustration for the two cocks on 28 and 29 makes the jowls of the second one into boxing gloves.  I studied more thoroughly "The Little Frog and the Heron" (42-43).  The engaging illustration shows the frog about to be eaten holding open the heron's beak and using a fork to prop it open.  The distressed frog makes a plea for moderation as the answer to climate change.  The heron is about to eat him when he opens his beak a little wider, and the frog drops out into the water and is saved.  Some illustrations like that on 47 might verge slightly on the obscene.  Similarly on 55 we have a bird who is farting out music.  A last great example of the art here is on 58-59.  The whole text is a set of about twenty "Je sais" statements from a young mouse facing a mouse trap.  These are all the things the mouse knows but he is not going to follow any of the commands he has received.  He is going to have experience of this great cheese.  How can our young forge their character except by making mistakes?  It is forbidden to forbid.  This is a book for which I wish my colloquial French were better.  In the meantime the illustrations are wonderfully engaging.  There is a T of C on 87.  Frout did several fable books earlier, listed on the front endpaper.

This 2012 publication is the second volume of the collected FABLES comic book series.  It reprints the second five monthly issues of FABLES in their entirety.  The back cover summarizes: "Ever since they were driven from their homelands by the Adversary, the non-human Fables have been living on the Farm – a vast property in upstate New Yok that keeps them hidden from the prying eyes of the mundane world.  But now, after hundreds of years of isolation, the Farm is seething with revolution, fanned by the inflammatory rhetoric of Goldilocks and the three Little Pigs.  And when Snow White and her sister Rose Red stumble upon their plan to liberate the Homelands, the commissars of the Farm are ready to silence them – by any means necessary!"  This volume includes a special sketchbook section of preliminary artwork from Willingham, Buckingham, and cover artist James Jean.

This large-format book (10" x 12") presents thirty-one fables on 89 pages.  The artistry is regularly creative.  This book was worth publishing!  The cicada here has an accordion or concertina that lies on the ground as the ermine-clad ant preaches at him (8-9).  The wolf towers over and surrounds the lamb wonderfully (15)!  This milkmaid is different.  She looks straight at us in the first picture (17); in the second, a small cloud rains directly on her as she carries in her hand a useless fragment of her jug (19).  The tortoise in TH carries a map of the race's course on his back (31).  He apparently gets the idea that "Depart" is crucial for "Arrive."  TMCM is a particular favorite (34-35).  Only a paw appears at the left, but the mice are running fast and afraid to the right.  The city mouse is well in the lead, and the country mouse is only starting to react to the threat.  In "Le Coche et la Mouche," the fly dominates the picture, zooming over the coach like a jet plane.  The schoolmaster preaching to the drowning child is perfect (45).  Do not miss the close-up of the bear next to the head of the traveller playing dead (51).  There is a fine picture of the anxious Grégoire digging a hole for his bag of money (59).  The retired rat is plump and self-satisfied in his posh surroundings (67).  Both the killer and the dead hen are well portrayed in GGE (69).  The artist presents a tour de force for "Le chameau et les bâtons flottants" (80-81).  This boat is also a dragon and a tin can!  Well done!

From the original "Favole" published in 2011 by Topipittori in Milan.  Here is a large-format (9" x 13¼") landscape -- rather than portrait -- book.  I feel as though I have known it before, but I cannot find it in the database.  The cover has a cat looking suspiciously around a table of fable characters, among whom is a stork dipping her beak deep into a tall glass.  The back cover advertises correctly: "Vingt fables amusantes, parfois cruelles, des plus connues aux plus surprenantes.."  The illustrations are indeed provocative, starting with the first fable's dog sick from devouring a snail.  Are we seeing his insides or the woods in which he found the snail?  In FC, three foxes rejoice in carnival costume over the fresh piece of meat teased away from the crow, who holds his hands high in outrage.  In DS, we can see the fish start to pick at the floating piece of meat.  My favorite in the book is "Prométhée et les hommes."  Since animals outnumbered people, Zeus asked Prometheus to transform a number of the former into the latter.  They have human form but bestial souls.  Rea mixes human and animal faces nicely here.  TMCM has the country rat, perched in a flower, turning his head toward a slightly open door.  The cover pictures turns out to be a doubting illustration of the fable in which a just lion king has all the animals come together in peace.  Rea suggests nicely that this plan may not work.  I wonder why many fable books are published because they have little new to offer; I do not have that question about this excellent book!

This book is basically the same as a 2014 publication by Bendon in Ashland, OH.  Like that book, this is a paperback book of some 182 pages featuring, in black-and-white, Velasquez' portrait of Aesop and many of Milo Winter's illustrations.  The cover there features a black-and-white profile of a lion with the moon looking like a coin in his nose!  Here it is Milo Winter's TH.  And the press here is Dalmatian Press in Franklin, TN.  These two books approach the ultimate in cheap illustrated fable books.  As I mention there, a worthy project would be to compare and contrast Knight's adaptation with the original texts coming, as I suppose, from Winter.

This is a large-format book (10½" x 14½") presenting a lovely broad sweep of some forty-five fables and illustrations approaching 160 in all.  Names of the artists used here are too many to fit into the database field for that item.  In fact, the artists include twenty-seven: Boillat, Born, Bouchot, Boutet de Monvel, Doré, Fraipont, Gélibert, Grandville, Hémard, Jeanjean, Klein, Lorioux, de la Nézière, Noury, Oudry, Rabier, Raffin, Sabran, Simon, Vimar, and six others.  Happily, I recognize the work of almost each of the candidates.  The choice of illustrators to match with fables seems very good to me.  There is such a wide range to choose from for each fable!  The last pages offer, respectively, biographies of the above twenty-one major illustrators, a chronology of the illustrators and editions, and a list of the illustrations' creators.  Less pretentious sources like the collectable paste-in stamps of Chocolates Menier are not neglected.  Boutet de Monvel shows up cleverly many times in the side or bottom margins.  The attribution of the work on 64 to Le Rallic helps me read a signature I have found difficult.  Raoul Thomen seems new to me.  Joanna Boillat in 2009 may be the most recent inclusion.  As I suggest by my comments, this book will be a valuable part of the collection for its help in identifying artists otherwise known only by their signatures.  This major work came at a very reasonable price.  In fact, the postage for bringing the book here was four times as great as the price of the book!  It sold originally for €35.

This 2012 publication is the first volume of the collected FABLES comic book series.  It reprints the first five monthly issues of FABLES in their entirety.  I will quote from Wikipedia: "Fables is an American comic book series created and written by Bill Willingham, published by DC Comics' Vertigo. Willingham served as sole writer for its entirety, with Mark Buckingham penciling more than 110 issues. The series featured various other pencillers over the years, most notably Lan Medina and Steve Leialoha. Fables was launched in July 2002 and concluded in July 2015.  The series features various characters from fairy tales and folklore – referring to themselves as "Fables" – who formed a clandestine community centuries ago within New York City known as Fabletown, after their Homelands have been conquered by a mysterious and deadly enemy known as "The Adversary". It is set in the modern day and follows several of Fabletown's legal representatives, such as sheriff Bigby Wolf, deputy mayor Snow White, her sister Rose Red, Prince Charming, and Boy Blue, as they deal with troublesome Fables and try to solve conflicts in both Fabletown and "the Farm", a hidden town in upstate New York for Fables unable to blend in with human society.  The series also deals with such other matters as the main characters' personal lives, their attempts to hide the Fables' true nature from regular humans (or "Mundies"), and, later, the return of the Adversary."  I include this to give fable researchers of the future a sense of the series, even though it has little to do with the sort of stories associated with Aesop's name.

There are three illustrated stories here: "The Pinstriped Panda"; "The Ghostly Bear"; and "Santa's Verdict."  The back cover introduces each.  Signed by Julian Defries: "To Emily and Tommy."  Each story has its own "The End" page.

"This lyrically told, richly illustrated fable for adults is the tale of a woman's search, in the wake of her mother's death, for a missing cat -- and a reminder that love, even when it goes astray, does not stay lost forever."  This statement on the book's back cover gets it right.  The story is on the very edge of fable or perhaps one step beyond fable, but I cannot resist including it in the collection.  The process the searcher goes through is highly instructive.  It touches on so much that is human.  "The San Francisco Chronicle" rightly says that the story "both honors the darkness around us and keeps the same darkness at bay."

"Exposition organisée par la Médiathèque du Grand Troyes du 15 septembre au 31 décembre 2012."  This is a beautiful colored pamphlet of 12 pages meant for school pupils.  The pupil has a chance to write his name, class, and school right on the cover.  The pamphlet offers a pleasant walk through the history of the illustration of La Fontaine's fables.  The cover presents Vimar's cover.  Specific sections show homage to La Fontaine; editions contemporary to La Fontaine; techniques of illustration like gouache, lithograph, etching, engraving, and drypoint; and two fables (GA and BC) presented over the ages.  Other artists presented in the pamphlet include: Oudry, David, Chauveau, Delierre, Doré, Vivier, Gouget, Lambert, Grandville, Girardet, Foulquier, Bauche, and the Japanese artists working with Barbouteau   I would have loved to see the exhibit!  Might Dali be the source of the mouse line-drawing on the back cover?  Otherwise he is not represented visually here.

This paperback makes use of Milan's earlier and larger hardbound publications in 2000 and 2007.  From the 27 fables illustrated there, this paperback chooses 18.  The 2000 cover is used, resized to fit this 6½" x 8¼" paperback.  The pretty frames are removed from the illustrations, and these illustrations now reach to the end of the page.  There is an unusual T of C at the beginning, since it gives page numbers but the rest of the pages do not!  The fables follow the same order as in the larger editions.  I miss the lovely ones that they have left out!  As I wrote there, the animal paintings here are strong on emotion.  The illustrations are generally two-page spreads.  Among them some are especially dramatic, like GA on 4-5.  Some fables are spread out onto two pages, but the two illustrations are distinct, as in GGE on 8 and 9 or FC on 10 and 11.  The wolf and the lamb are wonderfully contrasted in size and attitude on 22-23.  The chagrined fox leaving the stork's home on 35 is a classic.  The front cover's title spoils one of the most dramatic illustrations, since it obscures the wolf's tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.

This book represents a fascinating effort.  At first I thought it was going to be a collection of various parodies of La Fontaine's FC.  It is not that, but rather a creative presentation of some 97 different versions of La Fontaine created by the author.  The first two versions are a French translation of the Greek prose of the most original FC text in the Aesopic manuscripts and then La Fontaine's verse.  Thereafter the fun begins!  The imagination and the execution of this project are both remarkable.  Let me offer a sample of five approaches: (1) an acrostic, so that the opening letters of each verse spell "M Jean La Fontaine"; (2) a prose version after the manner of Balzac; (3) a scientific version needing more than a full page; (4) a tourist guide version; and (5) a rhyming version in English. T of C at the end.  136 pages.  5¼" x 8".  Printed upon demand.

This brightly colored book uses six chapters for its single fable.  The fable is a traditional one that includes several elements: that desperate victims should not be trusted; that human beings treat animals and plants poorly; that clever friends can get us out of tight places.  The artistic style emphasizes "Korean" and creativity.  Consider the creative view, for example, of the tiger caught in a pit (6).  This version is attentive to the detailed questions one could have about the story.  How, for example, does the merchant get the tiger out of the pit?  What does the tiger do first when he is out of the pit?  Chapter 2 covers the argument between the two when the hungry tiger threatens to eat the merchant.  Enjoy the tiger's frontal attack on 16.  The merchant argues that one cannot follow a good deed with a bad deed.  They will ask passersby to judge whether life is fair or not.  Depending on their verdict, the tiger will eat the man.  The booklet enjoys humor, too, as on 22 when the tiger, crouching upon the man and waiting for passersby, exclaims "Bother!"  The succeeding chapters present the answers of the ox and the tree.  To my surprise, the pine tree says that in his experience good follows good.  He shelters birds, and birds carry his seeds abroad.  The two opinions cancel each other out.  The hare, asked to be the tie-breaking judge, supposedly gets confused and has to ask the two to show him how it all happened.  Again, the book attends to detail: "Was that tree trunk in the pit then?"  Once the tiger is back in the pit without the tree trunk, the hare asks the merchant if he still wants an opinion.  The merchant goes away saying he will never again trust a tiger, and the tiger wonders whom he can now get to help him get out of the pit.  Good stuff!

Here is a print-on-demand paperbound copy of a book whose original edition from 1870 by the Weidmannsche Buchhandlung is in our collection.  As I wrote there, this is a treasure from the history of fable scholarship.  A beginning T of C lays out the two parts of the introduction on Phaedrus' paraphrases and the Aesopic fable in the middle ages.  Then come the four books of Romulus' fables and an appendix of some 73 fables, all of these numbered individually -- for a total of 156 fables.  There is a German AI at the end.  I think I am lucky to have found this book!   I presume that a reader of it now will want to have Thiele's "Der Lateinische Äsop" handy for comparison.

Here is a book of lively humor, more joke than fable.  "Unlike Aesop, however, these stories and their morals are meant to be more entertaining than moralistic" (viii).  The account of what might be known about Aesop is garbled.  MSA shows up on 15, with the moral "If you try to please everyody there is a good chance you will lose your ass."  "The Free Haircut" on 185 I have heard mostly as a religious joke about different orders.  A good sample of these stories is "The Temptation Test" on 149.  Much of the humor of these stories comes in well shaped punch-lines, like "You won't know what happiness is until you marry, and then it is too late" (153).  Printed on demand.  203 pages.  About 5" x 8".

At last I have a chance to read some of Rumi's tales.  There are forty-three numbered tales here.  Each receives a page of text on the right and a full-page acrylic-on-canvas painting on the left.  There is a T of C at the beginning of this large-format paperback.  I have read the first ten and enjoyed them.  Several are known fables, like "The Farm Animals and the Lion" (3).  This is the "Kalilah and Dimnah" story of regulated sacrifice.  "The Lion, the Wolf, and the Fox" is the story in which the wolf's fate teaches the fox to divide lion's spoils appropriately (11).  Some stories have surprising turns.  In the first, a man with more than medical insight understands why the beautiful girl is ill (1).  The prince had fallen in love with this girl, but did not know that she was in love with a young man from her village.  The prince had taken her from him.  He returns the two to each other, but soon the young man from the village dies, and the prince and girl get together despite it all!  A thief steals a snake from its owner but is fatally bitten by the snake (13).  The owner finds the dead thief and thereby discovers that his snake was poisonous.  Lucky for him!  In maybe the cleverest of this set, a parrot-owner will travel to India and asks his whole household what souvenir each wants (5).  His pet parrot asks him to tell the parrots at the Taj Mahal that he is imprisoned in a cage.  The traveler does that, and one of the parrots there immediately falls to the ground, apparently dead.  The traveler comes home and tells the parrot what happened.  The pet parrot immediately falls over, apparently dead.  Soon enough the owner takes him out of his cage -- and the smart parrot flies away!

Here is an 8½" x 11" pamphlet of 48 pages with a CD.  The five songs are meant for performance by pupils in the second through the fourth grade.  Besides the scores for the songs, the pamphlet itself includes production notes, scripts, a cartoon, production guides, advice on costumes and props, mask templates, and suggestions for choreography.  The five fables presented here are TH, GA, TMCM, LM, and BW.  The CD contains more materials, even things like a parent letter and a volunteer letter.  The authors have given the teacher here plenty of material to work with!  The pamphlet cover presents a pleasant visual composite of the five fables.

Here is an attractive, well-produced paperback book of 139 pages with very lively contemporary full-page colored cartoons.  The title comes from the Ethiopian proverb: "Smoke and courage will always find a way out."  The book is indeed built on proverbs rather than narratives, specifically the proverbs in Ethiopian Jewish culture.  The cartoons -- one for about every four full-page presentations of proverbs -- suggest a possible narrative for the proverb.  Several address the same perception as well-known fables, like GA (52-53); "Cobbler and Financier" (96-97); and WL (106-7).  This book is fun!

Here is the 2012 printing of a book that first appeared in 2000.  See our copy from that printing.  There are suble changes.  All reference to Pearson Learning has been removed.  The front cover adds "Aligns to the Common Core State Standards."  The back cover adds the price ($19.95) and the new ISBN number.  The paper of this edition seems thinner.  As I wrote then, this large-format book (about 8" x 11") has plenty of learning helps for teachers and students in the early grades.  Notice that it is meant as much for ESL students as for those learning English as a first language.  The pages are all tear-out and reproducible.  The versions are sometime disappointing.  In GA (21), the ant gives the grasshopper a scarf and a jacket but no food.  The good moral is that there is a time for work and a time for play.  SW (36) is told in the poorer form.  The lion (51) tells the caught mouse that he is going to make stew of him!  In BW (76), only the boy's father is summoned each of three times.  In TB (102), the bear supposedly tells the prone traveller that the fellow sojourner is not a true friend.  This is my first experience of that message, and I wonder if it works.  A bird tells the two goats who have fallen from the bridge to try it again by moving to the side to let each other pass (114).  I think this advice misses the point.  In GGE (125), the goose tells the owner that she can lay only one golden egg a day.  He tries to shake the other eggs out of her, and she runs away after five days.  Other stories include TH, TMCM, and CP.  There are good simple illustrations along the way, with even a story wheel on 122, and flash-cards for use with each story.

Here is an almost psychedelic, highly colorful, New Orleans inspired presentation of GA.  I have never seen ant-eyes as wild as those we meet right from the start, on the cover and in the first pages.  The first two lines make an excellent beginning: "Somewhere on the boulevard of backyards an ant was struggling with the remnants of a picnic."  How lovely!  Our first view then of the grasshopper is upside down, accompanied by his "buggy band."  The ant falls in love with the music.  It comforts her and makes her work easiser.  The band accompanies her, playing all the way, back to the colony.  To my surprise, the ant then invites them, in gratitude, into the cool of the underground.  This approach to the story takes La Fontaine and even Disney to a new level.  There is nothing at all negative anywhere from the ant or ants.  This version of the fable does not just ask for a bedrudging recognition of the artist.  It invites a wild celebration of the place of music in life.  "Laissez les bon temps roulez" indeed!  The moral of this telling is well expressed: "And the music.Made everything brighter."

This oversized 9¾" square paperback reproduces one story from the 2014 "Usborne Aesop's Stories for Little Children."  Though larger in format, the text and the illustrations are the same here.  GA ends happily with Ant inviting Grasshopper in out of the cold and Grasshopper promising that next summer he will work.

This book is apparently identical with another in the collection published in 1988 by Henry Holt in the Seaver Books series and acknowledged here in the copyright colophon.  A curious phenomenon in this republication by a new publisher is that the book is acknowledged as printed in China in 2011 but is copyrighted in 2012.  As I wrote on the earlier edition, there are here twenty-five stories that present Tolstoy very well.  A concern with humanity is, I would say, the common thread through these strong vignettes, which are mostly short stories rather than fables.  These are thus stories of pain inflicted or remembered, of modest achievements through hard work, or of learning.  The good introduction speaks about Leo Tolstoy's school at his country home ("Clear Glades").  Besides an eloquent version of the title story, there are three pieces regularly included among fables:  "Two Merchants" (32) with a great illustration of the iron-eating mice working on tools, nails, pots, and pans; "The `Dead' Man and the Bear" (40) with a good illustration (but why is the man shirtless?); and "Better to Be Lean and Free Than Plump and Chained" (47) with a good two-page illustration.  Among the best of the other stories are "The King and the Shirt" and "The Old Poplar."  A favorite book.

Helen Ward is giving herself generously to fables!  Unwitting Wisdom, King of the Birds, The Rooster and the Fox, and The Hare and the Tortoise precede this book.  Ward sets the story at Christmas time in New York in the 1930's.  She develops the story nicely, first by dwelling on the country mouse's love of the seasons in the country.  Next she lets the city mouse demonstrate what she aptly suggests: he is a mouse "with a lot to say."  The illustrations are lavish two-page spreads replete with detail.  My favorite shows a fenced elevator in the city going up beyond our eye level with the mouse on it behind the person transporting a Christmas tree.  What happens in the city is not altogether clear to me.  Eventually a pug dog appears.  Even as he is running, the country mouse thinks back to his beloved home.  He ends up "just a country mouse dreaming of spring."  A final image shows a mouse cleverly both inside and outside a round of blue cheese.  Originally published in England in 2011.  This is a rare book in present days that has a dust-jacket distinct from the book's cover.  The latter is red cloth, the former a gold-background image of two mice among leaves and flowers.  An oval sticker on the front cover proclaims "We believe in picture books!"  This book aptly rewards that belief.

This 8½" x 11" book is in a series that also includes, up until now, "Red Riding Hood" and "Three Pigs."  Sturdy cardstock allows for cutting out sections and gluing them in clearly marked places for the effects of a pop-up book.  The version of TH here is strange to me.  The tortoise is clumsy.  The hare slips on apples and sends them flying.  "One of the apples lands on the tortoise and shoots him out of his shell."  The young cutter-and-paster can decide who wins the race.  And the young reader can color in these black-and-white designs.

Here is a fascinating bit of cross-culture.  In 2010 and 2011, Hemma published French hardbound books of La Fontaine's fables illustrated by Philippe Salembier.  Now here is a paperbound book advertising Coca-Cola and Cine-Sur and presenting La Fontaine's fables in Spanish using the same illustrations by Salembier.  This book, 6¼" square, presents 28 of the 40 fables offered in those hardbound French editions.  It manages nicely to let illustrations from either the left or right hand extend across the spine into the text pages.  Contemporary technology and artistic ability combine for pictures that are colorful and exact.  TH offers a lively scene of the two animals, clothed and gendered, walking along a path by a field and then the mad dash to catch up at the finish (5-7).  One of my favorites is "The Stag and the Pool" (16-17); this illustration spreads beautifully across two pages.  In "The Lion Become Old" (34-35), the ass is climbing onto the lion's body to deliver his insulting blow.  AD has a whimsical illustration in which the ant is riding like a horseback rider on the dove (40-41).  Another favorite of mine shows the weasel and rabbit pleading all sorts of logic before the bespectacled cat (79).  Little do they realize that they are both about to get eaten!

Griset (cover) and Billinghurst (title-page) lead off.  Valerie Hotchkiss' foreword does as good a job as I have seen in introducing on one page the genre of fable and its place in our literature and life.  Regier then gives six pages to Planudes' life of Aesop, embellished by illustrations from Barlow, l'Estrange, and Croxall.  Would I have known before that Planudes has Aesop quoting Euripides eight years before the latter was born?  The five Barlow illustrations here are helpful to me because the Barlow edition in our collection is the earlier one without the illustrations on the life of Aesop.  Particularly good, I believe, are those picturing the "vomiting of the figs" and the carrying off of Aesop to jail.  Regier does well to honor Ben Edwin Perry and clarifies the place in history of the Collectio Augustana as against the Collectio Accursiana and its frequent offspring, the various Aesopi Phrygii editions.  In fact, Willis and I just discussed whether these were primarily school editions: I had not been aware of that context for them.  I had associated them with the travelling book sellers in northern Italy carrying their wares from town to town.  Regier goes on to observe that, under Croxall, who dismissed the life of Aesop as "monastic waggery," Aesop the slave striving for freedom has become an advocate of the status quo.  If I had known it, I had forgotten that Rousseau found "The Crow and the Fox" to be teaching children all too well that flattery works!  This introduction to the exhibit concludes by noticing that there is an Aesop edition for everyone.  Other artists included are Stockdale, Fry, Weir, Tenniel, Doré, Bennett, Condé, and Winter.  I find this a thoroughly exciting presentation as well as a lovely gift!

This sturdy, heavy, well-executed landscape book of about 9½" x 7" combines strong, detailed painting with clever replacement of key players in traditional fables.  Good examples are Fables 5 and 6.  In Fable 5, a kiwi asks a goose to teach her to fly.  Here the kiwi, who cannot fly, is assuming the traditional role of the tortoise or snail who asked to fly.  The goose, after trying in vain to dissuade her, carries her in a sling and drops her into the ocean.  In Fable 6, a slow tuatara wins over the nocturnal possum by arranging the race to start at daybreak.  Thus TH is played out with a significant change in its terms.  In Fable 13, it is not a monkey mother praising her child as most beautiful but a rooster praising his hen as most beautiful.  Fable 25 changes MM into the story of a student carrying flowers to a contest.  Some fables are utterly traditional but accompanied by paintings set in New Zealand, as is the case with Fable 11, "The Old Man and Death."  Fable 32 handles SW similarly, and Fable 47 does the same with 2P.  The paintings are strong, and the transpositions clever.  For each fable, there is a left-hand page with fable number, text, and moral, a right-hand page with a full landscape painting of the fable, and then a two-page spread offering a detail from the painting.  It is not surprising that a reader like me runs into many new species of animals in reading this book!  They are presented in glorious color!  The cover picture features the convalescing rabbit of Fable 31, who has the grass eaten out from around him by thoughtless friends.  First printed in 2012, and now reprinted for the third time in 2021.  This book is a perfect match for this collection!

Here is a lovely product of the labor of love of Paul Veres.  He has scanned an original copy of the 1857 edition, cleaned it up with Photo Shop, and reproduced it on excellent paper.  In this case, he has also bound the book with a fitting spine.  That spine in fact includes not only the title but a lovely little image of the dapper fox from "The Fox and the Crocodile" (18).  The result may be the cleanest version yet of Bennett in color.  Let me include some comments from the original hand-colored edition:  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."  The book-cover is colored.  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.  Notice the s that is shaped like an "f."  I had written that the 1857 copy was one of the stars of the collection.  I now say the same about this facsimile.  Veres and Calligraphics are not acknowledged in the book.

Here are twenty-five fables on 50  pages after nine pages of introduction.  Each fable gets two pages: the English and Spanish texts on one and a full-page colored illustration on the other.  The Spanish title is, curiously, "Apprende inglés con los fábulas de Esopo."  The art is what we used to call "modern art"; that is, it is somewhat non-representative.  The art usually pictures a single character rather than an event.  The best of the illustrations are the miser (23), the sick lion (24), the mice and weasels (34), FG (39), and the boy and hazelnuts (53) In GA, the ants scold the grasshopper: those who sing all summer must dance to bed without supper in the winter (12).

This book typifies many recent children's fable books in several respects: it is colorful, heavy, and its art may have been created on a computer.  Like a number of recent books, it has a "puffy" set of covers.  This book even has a purple ribbon that ties around it!  The book presents twenty-five fables on 192 pages.  I find the versions and the illustrations playful and helpful.  A snail travelling with the tortoise in TH is so exhausted that we can see his breath (11).  A mouse rides on the tortoise's back in the same picture.  There is a fine double-page (16-17) of the dramatic moment in LM.  In this version of GA, the ant happens by the grasshopper in winter and helps the grasshopper on condition that he promise to change next summer (27).  In GGE, the farmer and his wife demand more production from the "Golden Goose" (40), threatening otherwise to take her to market.  This goose leaves, and the couple bickers until they get over their greed and return to their former way of life.  Another happy ending comes in DS (49) when the dog's mistress gives him the bone he lost and she then found in the stream.  Then again, the spider releases the gnat from his web (65).  The occasion for TT is that the tortoise wants to have some fun and has envied other animals.  There is a fine illustration of the larger tortoise between the two ducks just after takeoff on 84.  Tortoise answers a crow "I am special" and tumbles to the ground but only has the wind knocked out of him.  "From now on I will be happy just being me!" (87).  "The Lion and the Elephant" is also well done: "Everyone has something they are afraid of" (105).  The fox tries several approaches with the crow in FC: the cheese is too large for one bird; the cheese will make the crow fat; we need to talk closer to each other; people say you have a great singing voice (116).  The donkey does a fine dance on the table (125) before the lapdog explains the donkey to the farmer.  Another fine image has the farmer's wife running to help punish the crazy donkey (126).  In FG, the fox tries to pole vault and to let the breeze carry him and his umbrella (145).  In BW, the boy says the first two times that the shepherd's shouting scared the wolf off (151).    "The Hare and the Hound" moralizes aptly: "Winning often depends on who needs to win the most" (177).

This is a surprisingly engaging book.  Fifteen fables are well thought through, well written, and beautifully illustrated, all using plants and animals related to California at some time in its history, even down to pizza and lifesavers and birthday cake on a kitchen counter.  Each of the fables gets a two-page spread.  A good introduction includes Hansen's reason for including morals: he "grew up hearing the fables with a moral attached and decided to present them in that familiar way" (ix).  Many morals are proverbial, like the first two.  Traditional Aesopic characters, like the crow and bull, yield respectively to native characters like the yellow-billed magpie and the bull elephant seal.  CP uses a basket bottle, and TB has a prospector, a bear, and a hollow log.  The animal in each initial appears also somewhere in the fable's illustration.  In TH, the tortoise makes this proposition: if he wins, the jackrabbit must let him sleep in peace.  The hare deliberately takes a "little nap."  In BF, the jay uses string.  In GA, the ant gives in but the grasshopper promises to work first and play later next year.  In this version of "The Bull and the Fly," the kelp fly gets the last word over the elephant seal: "You'll never find another fly like me!"  The illustration for FK shows a particularly good King Log.  "The Meadowlark and Her Children" includes a beautiful big old tractor.  It has a surprising moral: "Your mother knows best."  This fable goes through three phases.  In the first two the farmer waits for friends; in the third, he changes clothes and gets onto the seat of his tractor.  In LM, there's a cord to open the metal trap.  The mouse brings it to the lion.  At the end there is a section of "Fabulous Facts," offering "abundant details about the animals, plants, and locations depicted in each fable."  There is also a map of California on the back cover pinpointing where the fables might take place.  This is a beautiful book, beautifully produced.

Here is a fourth printing of this surprisingly engaging book, of which we also have a first printing.  Fifteen fables are well thought through, well written, and beautifully illustrated, all using plants and animals related to California at some time in its history, even down to pizza and lifesavers and birthday cake on a kitchen counter.  Each of the fables gets a two-page spread.  A good introduction includes Hansen's reason for including morals: he "grew up hearing the fables with a moral attached and decided to present them in that familiar way" (ix).  Many morals are proverbial, like the first two.  Traditional Aesopic characters, like the crow and bull, yield respectively to native characters like the yellow-billed magpie and the bull elephant seal.  CP uses a basket bottle, and TB has a prospector, a bear, and a hollow log.  The animal in each initial appears also somewhere in the fable's illustration.  In TH, the tortoise makes this proposition: if he wins, the jackrabbit must let him sleep in peace.  The hare deliberately takes a "little nap."  In BF, the jay uses string.  In GA, the ant gives in but the grasshopper promises to work first and play later next year.  In this version of "The Bull and the Fly," the kelp fly gets the last word over the elephant seal: "You'll never find another fly like me!"  The illustration for FK shows a particularly good King Log.  "The Meadowlark and Her Children" includes a beautiful big old tractor.  It has a surprising moral: "Your mother knows best."  This fable goes through three phases.  In the first two the farmer waits for friends; in the third, he changes clothes and gets onto the seat of his tractor.  In LM, there's a cord to open the metal trap.  The mouse brings it to the lion.  At the end there is a section of "Fabulous Facts," offering "abundant details about the animals, plants, and locations depicted in each fable."  There is also a map of California on the back cover pinpointing where the fables might take place.  This is a beautiful book, beautifully produced.

The seller's blurb has this to say: "12.5" x 6"; ten pages including pastedowns.  Original text and images.  Handprinted linoleum cuts on Rives paper. Bound in black paper wraps with cut-out star tipped on the front cover. Signed and numbered by the artist on the colophon.  A re-telling of the tale of a small fowl who believes the world is coming to an end because the stars are falling from the sky."  The artist's colophon actually mentions Stonehenge paper.  I leave this artist a good deal of slack because of the "Re-visited" in her title.  "Chicken Little" is not from Aesop, and this booklet does not proceed as "Chicken Little" does.  The story is a common folktale.  In its standard form, a chick believes that the sky is falling because an acorn has fallen on his head.  The present booklet begins rather "Chicken Little, I heard you say the stars have fallen down."  The interlocutor notes that not a sound has been heard.  The lovely second stage of the conversation then offers "If indeed a star should fall, would there be a sound at all?  Or would there be a mournful sigh, a sound so sad the clouds would cry?"  The final phase has this text: "Little bird you are wrong.  The stars did not fall but they will fade.  They dim their light for the coming day."  I have added punctuation in these quotations.  Lovely red and black art in a beautifully constructed book.  I have learned that Fran Watson has lived in Los Angeles, Houston and Boston, and now lives in San Diego. She is a painter and printmaker and has been creating artist books for many years. She is one of the founders of the San Diego Book Arts and her work appears in many University and private collections.

Each of thirteen fables get a spread of two pages facing each other, with one page for text and moral and the other for a page-covering illustration.  The final line of DW is "I'd rather be free than be a well-fed slave."  I find the beginning thoughts of the frog in OF unlikely.  He sees the bull and admits both that the bull is bigger than a hundred frogs and that he is only as big as the bull's eyeball.  Does not the fable go better if either the bull is out of sight or the frog thinks he is close to as big as the bull?  In "The Axe and the Fir Trees," multiple people come to the woods to ask for help in getting axe handles.  The Country Mouse seems to stay several days in town before repeated human footsteps scare him back to his home.  Morals are lengthy and accommodating, as in FG: "Don't fool yourself into saying that something is bad, when really you know it's good.  You're probably only saying it because you can't have it."  The artist's style is thoroughly distinctive.  The background in each picture is black.  The animals have curved geometric figures, often, as on the cover, with gentle arcs joining them.  Perhaps best of all the good illustrations is FC, where crow, cheese, and fox form an almost complete circle.  WL has an unusually stark illustration: the reflection of the wolf in the water has the lamb already inside him.  The book is not paginated.

I had found the 2012 German original of this lovely book in Mannheim fifteen months ago.  This book was pre-ordered through Amazon, and so it is indeed a first impression.  I will repeat comments I made there.  The book is unusual in opening not from right to left but from down to up; that is, one needs to hold it sideways and lift the cover.  The cover picture shows the half-painted jackdaw as he returns after opening his craw and being recognized by the doves whose food he was eating.  Why does his fellow jackdaw have various colored feathers protruding from his black body and even one such feather in his beak?  The pearl that the rooster finds in CJ is part of a ring.  The little goat dancing for the wolf uses a hula-hoop!  The expanding frog in OF is about to reach the ceiling of a modernistic garden-house!  He is elevated off the floor like a helium-filled balloon.  The one illustration for FS includes both the plate for the stork and the vase for the fox.  In fact, the wall behind the stork features several plates and the floor behind the fox shows three large vases with steam bubbles emerging from them.  The resting hare in TH has a hammock slung across the trail.  The dropped meat bubbles through the text, dividing its lines in DS.  The grapes break down through the ceiling of the fox's room in FG as clouds blow through the windows.  The city mouse is fishing in the soup at the city meal in TMCM!  A highway--or a racetrack?--winds among cheese wedges and salt and pepper shakers in this fable's tailpiece.  The rack of the stag in the pool reaches out like a tree and even includes a birdhouse!  What lovely imaginative work!  The book is, as regularly with Neugebauer, beautifully produced.

Here is a brand new reworking of both McGovern's texts and McClaskey's art.  A livelier TH cartoon cover replaces the more classical FG on the earlier two covers.  There is a clear reference to the text as copyrighted in 1963 by McGovern, but the very first fable evidences several changes.  The first sentence changes "A hungry fox stole into a vineyard" to "A hungry fox snuck into a vineyard" (3).  This edition uses only black-and-white internally but livens up the page with more dramatic backgrounds and typefaces.  This book in format is uniform with the later and smaller "Apple Classics" version of the book.  That series is not mentioned here.  The price of the book has gone from the original's "$.45" to the Apple Classics' "$2.75" to the present $4.99.  "About Aesop" in the earliest version was the first element a reader met after the title-page.  In the Apple Classics version, it was at the book's back.  Now it has come back, slightly modified, as "Introduction" at the front.

As the verso of the title-page makes clear, this book has a rich history.  It was first published by Penguin in 1954, with a new edition in 1964.  Puffin published it in 1993.  This new Puffin edition does, as far as I can tell, three things.  First, it reduces the book's page size.  The book is only a few pages longer, because most fables still fit easily on one page.  Secondly, it corrects the long-standing error through all those earlier editions, which had in the quotation beginning #96, "Metamorphosis," the Latin "expells" for what should be "expellas."  This edition has "expellas."  Thirdly, this edition adds a three-page introduction by Marcus Sedgwick.  He reviews what can be known about Aesop and about fables and offers a lovely quotation from Apollonius about Aesop: "He was really more attached to truth than the poets are; for the latter do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable; but he, by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events" (vii).  Here we have 207 numbered fables on 218 pages, as the beginning T of C makes clear.  The cover here features a two-color presentation of TH.

Here is a surprising reprint of Jones and Rackham's work.  Its special feature is a soft orange "composition" cover.  Embossed into this composition front cover are some twelve morals from Aesop's fables around a blue title.  On the back cover, the fable of "The Two Sacks" is embossed entire.  Inside, the book has 284 numbered fables on 239 pages.  The book stops dead at that point.  Along the way are many Rackham illustrations, unfortunately all reduced to gray-and-white.  Some, like "The Moon and Her Mother" (14) are particularly indistinct.  It would be informative sometime to count the number of reprints of Jones and Rackham that have appeared in the time since the copyright expired in 1987.  This edition and at least some of my other reprints have in "The Kid and the Wolf" on 165 a typo whereby the "gods" gave chase to the wolf, when clearly "dogs" is asked for by the story.  I had already bought this book from Amazon but it got sent to Berkeley, where it will wait some months for me to pick it up.  Ironically, I found this copy staring at me on a random visit to this bookshop on Fifth Street in Berkeley, and I did not recognize it as the book I had ordered earlier.

Here is a fascinating recent book.  It is securely in the tradition of reprints of Milo Winter's work from 1919.  There are some curious features here in this hardbound book, well produced in China.  First, it seems to offer 147 fables on 8 + 102 + 1 pages.  Original editions seem to have involved 146 fables on 112 pages.  Secondly, this book occasioned my checking Bodemann: this crucial book among popular American fable editions does not appear in Bodemann!  There is a T of C at the beginning.  The color graphics here are well defined, both partial-page and full-page illustrations.

Here is a new hardbound version of the book first printed in 1991 by Classics International Entertainment.  The number in the Classics Illustrated series has shifted from #26 then to #18 now.  The frontispiece advertises the nineteen books in the series.  Several pages at the end advertise a deluxe series and offer pages from another number in the series, which is seen now as a series of graphic novels.  Pink endpapers present the last scene from "The Prophet."  This book is unpaginated, but I will keep the page references from the earlier publication so that readers can find particular stories more easily.  As I wrote then, I really like this book.  There are twenty-five fables told in this comic-book format, generally receiving one or two pages.  Only "The Quack Frog" (26) and TMCM (40) get more pages, a total of three and four respectively.  Among the best-told and best-illustrated are FC (4), "The Quack Frog," WS (33), and "The Soldier and His Horse" (35).  Often fables told with humans as characters elsewhere in the Aesopic tradition are pictured with animals here, like the monkey astronomer (6) and the spendthrift (23; sorry, I cannot tell what animal this is!).  There are some curious differences here from the tradition.  In FM, the frog fails to note that he is drowning the mouse (7).  A dog-barber sharpens the boar's tusks with a steel file in his shop (12).  The monkey who dances before the camel tries to dance is a voluptuous female (24).  The moral for "The Tortoise and the Eagle" is "envy is the strength of fools" (10) and for "The Viper and the File" it is "The covetous are poor givers" (20).

There are 101 numbered fables here on some 92 pages following a T of C and introduction and followed by some 14 pages of advertising for Two Horizons Press.  The illustrations and texts are borrowed without attribution from Milo Winter's "The Aesop for Children," with adaptations made in choice of Valdemar Paulsen's words at several places.  The reproduced art is colored on the covers but black-and-white inside the book.  The front cover offers a background photograph of an African savanna, presumably because, as the back cover reveals, "Aesop was an African storyteller who lived in ancient Greece."  The front cover's title letters are cut out from Winter's illustrations.  Here we near the ultimate in cheap knock-off editions.

I got this lovely book at a much reduced rate by ordering it early on Amazon.  The combination of Waters and Testa remains strong, as it did in their 2010 "Aesop's Fables."  The flyleaf proclaims "This stunning collection revitalises forty of Aesop's lesser-known fables, which have been rewritten by the talented anthologist, Fiona Waters, and sumptuously illustrated by renowned artist, Fulvio Testa."  Yes!  Every fable but the last follows the same format: a left-hand page offers a title, a smaller image, a text, and a moral.  The right-hand page is completely covered with a second illustration.  The last fable spills over onto third and fourth pages with yet another illustration on the last page.  Waters makes the best sense I have seen of "The Fisherman and his Music" (18).  Testa's magic is again at work in the peaceful smile of the sleeping dog on 27 while his blacksmith master casts an unapproving eye on him.  In this version of "The Boy Bathing," the man is still lecturing on the bank and the boy is still struggling in the water as the fable ends (34).  Both the telling and the picture are fine in SS (50); this peddler goes directly back to market twice after the ass's first and second slips, and, after the third "slip" "set off home with a quietly satisfied smile on his face."  Both picture and moral are superb for "The Travellers and the Plane Tree": "A freely given service is often met with ingratitude" (62).  "The Leopard and the Fox" (82) makes a fine cover picture, repeated on the dust-jacket.

I count four previous editions or printings of this book in the collection, but all have had Ravi Shankar as their illustrator.  Now Prabha Mallya has supplied large colored illustrations in this 7½" x 9¾" book.  The pictures tend to present single characters rather than scenes or relationships; thus the book's front cover gives a good sense of them as it arrays them around title and author.  An exception to this rule comes on 18, which shows the mosquito poised for an attack on the king.  Another fine illustration presents the cat playing his fiddle outside the window of the foxes (71).  Another fine piece is the double-page image of the elephant and the tragopan sipping tea together (110-11).  As I wrote earlier, the book offers ten well told, witty tales in verse that include two slightly expanded from Aesop but with different contemporary twists.  The eagle dies of grief over the beetle's continual destruction of his eggs wrought out of vengeance for the beetle's old friend, the hare.  And the female hare ends up losing the race but winning all the press acclaim.  The other tales come two each from India, China, the Ukraine, and "the Land of Gup."  "The Mouse and the Snake" from China is a good fable with an ironic ending comment.  "The Cat and the Cock" from the Ukraine uses repeated lines very well (63).  In #9, the frog manager ruins the nightingale and never knows it.  Prabha Mallya is mentioned only in the colophon and on the back cover.  The lack of mention of her in the front of the book is surprising.

The preface describes the stories here as "cautionary tales" like fables and parables.  The golden age for such tales in China was in the fourth and third centuries BCE.  The preface refers to Wilfram Eberhard's "Chinese Fables and Parables" as a great source; I will need to look for it.  This book presents nineteen of these stories.  They depict mostly human beings, like the bride that jogs inside her carrying sedan when it breaks down or the man who muffles his ears so that the sound of breaking up a huge bronze bell will not give him away.  "The King of Beasts" (33) is traditional and well known.  In it, a captured fox convinces his capturing lion that he is the king of beasts by inviting the lion to walk behind him as he visits all the animals.  A typical story among those here is "Cooking the Duck" (39).  Two brothers waiting to hunt ducks get into an argument about their preparation.  Their arguing and fighting scare away the ducks.  "Scaring the Tigers" (45) is fun.  As mother tiger explains to her cub, "I can fight thieves and robbers any day.  And bows and arrows are nothing to me.  But I cannot fight a monk who asks me for that many donations!" (46).  "The Dragon Slayer" (47) is an apt story of an ambitious young man who spurned all other possible livelihoods to study as a dragon-slayer for years.  When he came back ready to practice his trade, "Chu found no dragons, and he was left with nothing to do" (48).  "No Takers" (51) echoes classical Western stories.  A saint offers to every creature to change its one ugly feature so that it has a pleasing face.  "There were no takers" (51).  "The Egg" (52) is like MM, only in this case the wife throws the source of all their coming wealth, one egg, against the wall when her husband declares that they will use their future riches to buy a maid.  A note at the book's end describes the whimsical illustrations as inspired by Chinese folk art.  Elements of traditional Chinese art incorporated include earth, charcoal, ground tea powder, pressed leaves, and sackcloth.  The pencil and wash illustrations were done on bamboo rag paper.  The illustration for "The Practical Bride" (6) offers a fine example, as the bride's feet are barely visible under the sedan.

Here is my fifth Dedieu pop-up book, the third German.  It has not appeared yet in English, and I just ordered the French.  This is again exquisite work.  The six fables presented here are FC; GA; OF; WC; LM, and TMCM.  The hint of the outside world in TMCM is good, as is the movable proximity of frog to ox in OF and of fox to crow in FC.  In each case, the fable text is presented on the left and the right of the central pop-up picture.  As in the other four Dedieu copies I have, the book is beautifully put together.

This book is a treat for two reasons.  First, it has fun with its fables.  The art plays with the texts, and there is some art with every text.  Secondly, the breadth of fables here is remarkable.  So many resources well used!  Even Rafik Schami has a nine-page story here.  I am delighted to find someone who took the time to assemble so many good texts.  I count some seventy-five texts, and no single author is given a monopoly.  The fox and stork on the cover are only a first suggestion of the fun here.  Their true story shows up on 118-19.  Among the best new texts for me I would mention Pfeffel's "Der Junge Hase" (107) who got a bloody nose, not from a dog but from "a huge mouse"!   Among the best illustrations I would mention "Das Hähnchen, die Katze und das Mäuschen" (46-47).  Well done!

This book reprints "Das grosse Fabelbuch, Für die Jugend ausgewählt von Walter Heichen," published by Weichert in Berlin about 1905.  Several colored illustrations were dropped.  Some 25 authors are included, including a few foreigners like La Fontaine and Iriarte -- but not Samaniego or Florian.  As the dust jacket notes, many of the fables are in verse and are suitable for reading to the young.  The dust jacket's front cover shows a clever cartoon of a hedgehog stopping a running rabbit.  The organization of the book proceeds by authors in chronological order after a large dose of the fables of Hey.  From there the book moves to Aesop, Boner, Waldis, Hagedorn, La Fontaine, and Gellert.  Then Lichtwer, Weisse, Pfeffel, Lessing, Ramler, Goethe, Grillparzer, Rückert, Fröhlich, Krummacher, Iriarte, Hebel, Schopenhauer, Güll, Reinick, Seidel, Greif, and Hebel.  The black-and-white designs are infrequent but they relate well to specific fables.  There is an AI of authors at the back.

The title continues: "A Moral Teacher of the German Nation."  Here is a helpful book, especially since this collection includes no other translation of Gellert's work.  The foreword helps carve out Gellert's place in the history of fable.  Reading of a sample of the offerings here prompts the following reactions.  It is hard for me to know when we are dealing with a fable and when with an "Erzählung," especially since the former tend to be longer and the latter shorter than we would expect.  A frequent target is writers of low quality.  They are like larks trying to vie with nightingales.  It is no use, and people recognize poorer quality.  This theme appears in "The Nightingale and the Cuckoo" (189-90) and elsewhere.  "Two Black Men" (208-10) is a curious piece.  Two black slaves are in love with the same black woman.  They love each other, and she loves them both.  She refuses to settle the matter and leaves it to them to choose whom she will marry.  They struggle long with their feelings and finally decide together on the following plan: they kill her and then each other!  Gellert's moral is just as curious: "The cause of acts that break all Nature's laws/Can be an impulse noble in itself/That has become depraved as time has passed--/And just because it never has been trained."  I find "The Monkey" (136-37) helpful.  A monkey studies players playing checkers and wants to get in the game.  A serious player asks the monkey "Should I do x?" and the monkey nods "Yes."  "Should I do y?"  "Yes."  Should I do z?"  "Yes."  If people want you to think they have grasped exactly what you are saying, ask their advice.  If they say a quick "yes," you will know that they "don't have a clue."  Gellert tells the traditional fable of the blind man and lame man.  Advantages given to others belong to us all "As long as we're companions here below."  An old favorite of mine is "The Land of the Lame" (23-24).  The easy walker is laughed at in the land of the lame; he needs to learn how to walk!

The cover of this reprint is almost identical with the cover of a book I have by the same title and the same authors, but the books are, I learn to my surprise, totally different.  Chavannes and Chavannes did a book for Éditions Bossard in 1921.  It included eighteen Chinese fables of Hindu origin, accompanied by 46 designs of Andrée Karpelès of various sorts and sizes.  The first two stories were "Le Buveur du vin" and "Beau-Pelage et Belles-Dents."  The booklet had 94 + iv pages.  Now here is a copy of a book which had the same dimensions (5" x 6½"), title, authors, and publisher.  It contains twenty-two Chinese fables of Hindu origin different from those in the 1921 edition, accompanied by fewer Karpelès designs.  The cover no longer mentions the number of designs.  This booklet was published in 1927, with a preface by Joseph Bédier.  Its first two stories are "Queue en tête" and "La Cruche."  It has 114 + iv pages.  I sampled "Le Loup et la Brebis" (77) and "Le Lion et le Chacal" 101).  They are effective and in keeping with the tradition of fable literature.  The woodcuts range from small printer's designs to full-page illustrations.  I find them rather simple and predictable.

As I wrote about the parallel Florian volume published two years earlier, I am so glad to see a publisher take up Barboutau's classic work published in the mid 1890's and reproduce it well, as again this large and impressive volume does.  The detailed work of the skilled Japanese artists is able to stand up to the expansion of the illustrations.  The details still look good.  This book also solves a problem in the Japanese first editions, namely that the illustrations were spread across two pages, and some of the artistry in the very center of the two pages was not visible.  Here a sturdy spine enables a viewer to see the full image.  Among my favorites from this viewing are: FC (20-21); OF (28-29); FS (36-37); OR (48-49); and "The Bird Wounded by an Arrow" (56-57).  I will stop listing them here because I am, with good reason, listing almost all of them!  The front dust-jacket presents a lovely detail from "The Sun and the Frogs" (100-101).  In fact, the editors have altered the image to bring more of it together.  There is a T of C on 127, and the five artists are acknowledged for their specific contributions on 129.  The book begins with a four-page essay by Barbey d'Aurevilly from 1889.

Here is a new presentation of a work originally done by Gründ in 2000.  A large book 8¼" x 11½" and 586 pages long has been reduced to a book 7" x 8¼" and 349 pages long.  The earlier work was complete and divided into La Fontaine's usual twelve books; this version is not divided by books, and its fables are listed not by number but only by title.  The order follows, to judge by its earliest fables, roughly La Fontaine's original order, but with various fables dropped.  Thus I 3 and I 4 are not here and TMCM appears before "The Lark and Her Young."  Some small designs from the original version are expanded here, not always successfully; compare the goat on 16 here that on 24 there and the wolf on 21 here with that on 29 there.  All of that being said, I still love Born's work and am delighted to see it again presented as playfully as I believe it was conceived!

This is an oversized (about 9½" x 13") transformation of Doré's original version of 1867 by Hachette, now published by Chêne.  The unusual feature of this heavy book is that it colors 43 of Dore's 85 full-page illustrations.  The coloring artists are Ulric Maes and Camille Durand-Kriegel.  These dramatic renditions are matched with their texts in a format otherwise true to Hachette's original edition, including Dore's headpieces and endpieces.  This section takes up 69-265.  The verso of each picture page is blank, with both included in the pagination.  The coloration brings out some drama I would not have otherwise found in Doré's systematically dark presentations.  My selections as among the best of the colorizations are "The Swallow and the Little Birds" (81); TMCM (85); WL (89); MSA (123); FK (133); "The Cobbler and the Banker" (205); and "The Two Goats" (249).  What follows after that larger segment of the book is a complete presentation in print only – quite small print at that! – of the remaining fables of the original edition.  I was lucky to find this book on Ebay.  I wonder how I missed it for seven years!  The early material up to 68 includes the "Notice" by Geruzez, the dedication to the Dauphin, the preface, the life of Aesop, and the dedicatory poem to the Dauphin.

This is an 82-page book, 6½" x 9¼", presenting 12 well-told fables of 4 to 8 pages each.  The fables are especially well chosen for their lessons to young children.  The only eating of one animal by another occurs when the king-seeking frogs get a crane king.  There are good changes in several fables from the usual Aesopic form.  DW is about two dogs.  "Horse and Ass" is about two mules, and one of them only falls and does not die.  The text offers special help to early readers by underscoring and highlighting unusual uses of letters.  There is a full-page illustration on every right-hand page.  I would be happy having my child learn fables with this book!  The Core Knowledge Foundation, founded in 1986, is in Charlottesville, Virginia.

This lovely blue-covered book with white figures is actually based on Dover's printings of Calder in 1948 and 1968.  The 36 texts are presented in both French and Portuguese, the latter heralded with unusually presented titles.   Calder's designs are, if anything, larger here than in Dover's presentation.  I am happy to greet old friends here, like the lion in love (20).  This is a well-made book.  6½" x 8¼".

Printed on Modigliani paper and bound in Indian goatskin blocked in gold foil, this volume is both a treasure and a star!  I have wanted to include it in the collection since I learned of its existence.  Blake has been a favorite illustrator of mine, and I was delighted to learn that he was taking on La Fontaine.  The frontispiece has La Fontaine sitting in a traditional pose under a tree with scroll and pen in hand.  The milkmaid sits next to him, with her pitcher next to her.  A fox and a frog look on, while a crow sits perched above them in a tree with a round of cheese in his beak.  Perfect!  I agree with Sarah Bakewell when she writes at the end of her introduction that illustrators "endlessly reinvent" La Fontaine's fables, "bringing out contemporary implications and associations" (xvi).  Each fable gets some illustration.  Many receive a full-page colored illustration, and many have additional pictures of various designs.  Some of the best are these.  Both mice look up startled in TMCM (15).  The fox has turned suddenly to look for the dogs who may not yet have heard about the universal peace (17).  Blake does not hesitate to imitate traditional approaches, as in "The Wolf Turned Shepherd" (25).  Without careful analysis, I would guess that we are seeing a fair amount of Grandville and Doré well digested and re-presented.  My sense of Blake's best gifts is well represented in FM: the eyes and posture of both animals during the frog's plunge are zany, even in the midst of catastrophe, as the mouse desperately clings to a reed.  Equally comic is 2W, as the now bald man thinks about both mistresses (56).  Do not miss the end of the rat who encountered an oyster: only two paws and a tail are outside the closed shell (68).  The leap of the transformed cat-woman is wild and bloody (83): again Blake manages to communicate the catastrophic and the zany.  The two illustrations for FG distance the fox from the grapes well; he jaunts off with an eye still on the fruit (96).  Shapiro remains a wonderfully clever translator, as at the end of "The Mountain in Labour": "Fine words! And yet, what often comes to pass?  Just gas."  What a treasure!

There are seven fables here, as the early illustrated T of C shows.  They are the perfect choices for little children:  FC, TH, GA, OF, WL, FS, and LM.  La Fontaine's verse is transformed into easily understood prose.  The illustration styles are colorful and lively.  As on the title -page, the climactic page of FC has a line to show the path of flight of the cheese from crow's beak to fox's mouth.  After each good prose telling, there is a La Fontaine's verse text.  The first scene of TH has animals in various human pre-jogging poses.  The bear even has his water-bottle!  The frog makes frog paw-marks in the stripe that the stag has drawn as the starting line.  True to La Fontaine's version, the hare rests with his soda-plus-straw at the starting line.  He tells himself that this victory will bring him no great glory.  In this version, it is to show his defiance that he takes a little nap at the starting line.  He awakens to see the tortoise almost at the finish line.  In GA, the cicada here does not say the full the sentence that includes "Je chantais."  OF starts with a lovely rhyming proverb: "D'un oeuf, jamais on ne fera un boeuf.  Cette morale n'a rien de neuf."  The frog here undergoes an identity crisis.  She had thought herself the "queen of places."  Her humiliation sets up here for her attempt to get back her identity.  Her skin takes on various colors.  "Petit ou grand, restez vous - même car c'est ainsi qu'on vous aime."  The book's most dramatic images are those of the black wolf encountering the white lamb.  If I were a parent of a young child, I would be delighted to read him or her this book. 

This is a surprising book in several ways.  First, I am surprised and delighted to see someone take on the task of translating all of La Fontaine's fables.  Bravo!  Secondly, I am surprised to find this a print-upon-demand book.  Thirdly, I am surprised to find an apparent dedication by the author: "For Gina and Joe, All best wishes, Randy."  I am surprised to see the many illustrations here.  Most are black-and-white illustrations by Vimar.  There seems to be a second set of more fully colored illustrations.  I am surprised finally that neither of these artists is acknowledged.  I have read a number of the early fables in Book 2, and I find them delightful.  Several may be liberal in their transformation of La Fontaine's fables into suitable contemporary language.  Several also play with distinct rhythms at the very end of the fable.  I am surprised to see rhyming couplets work so well.  Well done!  Runyon is the author of a number of books, including "In La Fontaine's Labyrinth: A Thread Through the Fables" and a translation of the Contes.

I thought I already had a copy of this book.  At last I have found it on a shelf of books waiting to be catalogued.  This copy is identical with one already catalogued except that this has no signed note from the author.  I will keep it in the collection as a clean copy.  As I write there, this is a surprising book in several ways.  First, I am surprised and delighted to see someone take on the task of translating all of La Fontaine's fables.  Bravo!  Secondly, I am surprised to find this a print-upon-demand book.  Thirdly, I am surprised to see the many illustrations here.  Most are black-and-white illustrations by Vimar.  There seems to be a second set of more fully colored illustrations.  I am surprised finally that neither of these artists is acknowledged.  I have read a number of the early fables in Book 2, and I find them delightful.  Several may be liberal in their transformation of La Fontaine's fables into suitable contemporary language.  Several also play with distinct rhythms at the very end of the fable.  I am surprised to see rhyming couplets work so well.  Well done!  Runyon is the author of a number of books, including "In La Fontaine's Labyrinth: A Thread Through the Fables" and a translation of the Contes.

Two fables show up in this collection of 20 fairy tales done in simple fashion for children.  The booklet has eight pages.  Angelita is happy working on the farm.  One day her mother tells her that she may use the profit of selling the milk she gets from the cow, and she can buy what she wants.  She carries in her hand her pitcher of milk happily towards town.  She stops on a bridge to think about her plans.  She talks to a bird about what she might do.  She explains to a shepherd on the road the steps in her future plans: hen, sow, cow.  She crosses a river in a rowboat.  On the other side she meets a donkey and tells him her plans.  She then does a leap of joy.  Alas, she falls, breaks the jar.  My, this is an unusual -- and highly contorted -- variation of the fable!

Two fables show up in this collection of 20 fairy tales done in simple fashion for children.  The booklet has eight pages.  The characters are pictured as male (hare) and female (tortoise) from the start.  Apparently, the tortoise takes a break to eat carrots during the race.  He also smells the flowers and soon falls asleep.  The best picture in the book may be that of the hare, awakened, walking briskly toward the finish.  He is in for a surprise!  Two morals are announced: "No hay que burlarse jamás de los demás" and "Con constancia, paciencia y firmeza puedes alcanzar el exito."  Simple stuff! 

"Un conte écrit et raconté par Anne Roumanoff d'après les Fables de La Fontaine."  This 32-page landscape-formatted book, now missing its CD, presents another extensive and engaging contemporary adaptation of La Fontaine's fable with delightful animal figures.  Gaston Le Héron is descendant of nobility living in much reduced circumstances these days.  "Je ne suis pas n'import qui" is a favorite statement of his.  His pride gets stretched even further when, shortly before the family's annual vacation, he is named "comptable en chef" at work.  This time the family will eat a worthy restaurant meal, not the usual picnic!  Gaston will not hear of a self-serve or of fast food or pizza or burgers.  The fancy restaurant recommended by their guidebook turns out to be catering a wedding.  The next worthy restaurant turns out to be closed.  The fast food place they finally find is sold out of everything except snacks.  Mrs. Heron goes to a grocery store and buys Gaston a cold croquet-monsieur.  Wanting to gain too much risks losing everything!  The last pages offer La Fontaine's fable with helps and questions.  This is the fourth of Roumanoff's adaptations that we are lucky enough to include in the collection.  Not the least virtues of this book are the lively illustrations and the wonderfully concrete sense of what kids actually do!  This book is smaller in size than others of Roumanoff's books.

"Un conte écrit et raconté par Anne Roumanoff d'après les Fables de La Fontaine."  This 32-page landscape-formatted book presents another extensive and engaging contemporary adaptation of La Fontaine's fable with delightful animal figures.  Huluberlue La Tortue does everything slowly while Phildebert Le Lièvre hurries through everything.  Even their respective families follow the same patterns.  Huluberlue spends months training under a kind coach from school and, in a big race, she does well enough while Phildebert underestimates her and loses.  The last pages offer La Fontaine's fable with helps and questions.  There is a CD included.  This is the second of Roumanoff's adaptations that we are lucky enough to include in the collection.  Not the least virtues of this book are the lively illustrations and the wonderfully concrete sense of what kids actually do!

This is one of the dearest books in the collection.  There are multiple stories connected with it.  First, in a visit to Strassbourg that was a veritable roll of the dice, I happened near the end of the visit to walk again past the great cathedral.  Facing the cathedral was an antiques store to which I had not paid attention.  This time, in the window, I saw an edition -- this edition! -- of fables illustrated by the former owner of this antiques store.  Bingo!  I had to come back later, because the store opened only after lunch.  I had a pleasant chant with the owner, grandson of the former owner and book illustrator.  I learned that there was a DVD using his grandfather's illustrations.  I bought both the book and the DVD and was delighted to do so.  Final story: In the summer of the pandemic, I watched with delight the DVD episodes, which I believe aired on TV one at a time over a space of days and weeks.  They are delightfully done.  As I reviewed them, I asked myself: "Where is the book?"  I looked in many places in the constricted pandemic world.  After days of searching, I was again allowed to visit some of the collection's places in the University, and there I found the book.  It is time to celebrate, not least of all because of the creative, playful artistic approach of Jean Bastian.  Among the best of the illustrations here are FS, OR, WL, and TMCM.   Enjoy them!

This book presents a strong and even provocative version of this great fable.  The back cover speaks rightly of Morel's "gravures explosives."  The very size of the book helps with its overlarge and unusual format: 9⅜" x 13".  Bombed cities and gas masks -- even on birds -- help to set the scene.  The ass's first appearance is revealing: he sits awkwardly in a light colored suit without a tie among other animals in dark business suits and ties.  In the midst of the lion's confession, his face appears in a double-page spread screaming and bloody.  Murderous animals appear in monk's robes as they confess their "peccadilloes."  Fox, alligator, and clerical wolf are all well rendered, suitably hypocritical -- and then suitably outraged at the ass's terrible crime.  Strong stuff, well done!

I first noticed the beauty of this book as I enjoyed "Les Fables de La Fontaine Illustrées par les Plus Grand Artistes" published in 2015 by Circonflexe.  Imagine my surprise a few days later as I opened some unopened packages of books.  I had ordered it five months earlier.  This large format (11" x 14¼") book is very impressive!  As the closing T of C shows, there are here fifteen of La Fontaine's fables.  Each is presented in a sequence of four pages.  A stiff blank colored page on the left is followed by a title-page with several cutouts of major figures or objects in the fable.  Through those cutouts in the stiff white page one starts to see portions of the colorful decoupage art work for the fable.  One turns the page, and the stiff white page has La Fontaine's text arranged around the cutouts with a verse or two repeated in enlarged bold print.  The fourth page presents the decoupage, a large single-colored "Scheerenschnitte" cutout against a background of the first page's color.  Several colorful elements are then pasted upon the large cutout.  Three things make this book so special.  The first is the decoupage page.  Fornage's sense of color and his gift for design make these artworks glorious!  The sheer size of the background cutout gives the artist room to present cultural context with just enough color to let the highlighted scenes stand out.  The second feature is the cutout page.  I did not expect this element!  The cutouts repeat several elements from the larger art work.  These same figures are used also in a fine silhouette procession across the book's endpapers.  Thirdly, each fable is set in one French geographic context, identified in the T of C.  One rises from the fable at the bottom of the decoupage into a presentation of the region.  For example, the first fable, FS, presents a peasant home in Alsace and offers peasants who live there, with their children and animals.  This scheerenschnitte is, by the way, a true exemplar in that it was cut to present matching mirror images around a symmetrical center.  Only the pasted-in fox and wolf are not symmetrical.  The two pots they lean on are!  Among the decoupages, my prizes would go to the simplest, like FS, FC, and OR.  The best cutout is surely the lion in LM.  What fun!

This is a republication of a book already in the collection by the same publisher, author, and artist but two years earlier in 2011.  What has been updated?  The ISBN, covers, and date of publication.  As I wrote there, this is a large-format (9" x 13") book presenting twenty fables with eight pages for each.  The poetry text page at the beginning of each fable is formatted to look like a familiar old book with worn hinges.  There are then prose texts along with the illustrations for each story. The colored art is done in broad strokes, sometimes taking a whole page, like the crow on 14, and sometimes smaller portions, like the mouse held by the lion on 19.  The art might even be called primitive in the non-pejorative sense.  Perrette goes through a significant sequence of emotions that are well pictured in MM (26-31).  The artist gives us a good sense of La Fontaine's perception of the beginning of the TH race:  the hare rests with a cocktail in a lawn chair while the race starts and the tortoise moves off (45).  The frog in OF is a diminutive slender female who wants to put on weight.  The ox recommends the "balloon" method to fill out, and she falls in love with the method!  The approach of this art is especially appropriate, I believe, for TMCM, which is well presented (80-87).  One of the best illustrations presents the wolf and lamb either as mirrored in the water or as seen from below the water-line (125).  The new front cover is repeated from the illustration preceding the title-page.  The new back cover offers unrelated vignette illustrations from GA, FC, and TMCM.  Both covers shift from third-person language ("une version adaptée pour les petits") to second-person ("une version adaptée pour toi").  Among the many big, inexpensive fable books that appear in France year after year, this is a favorite.  T of C at the beginning.

Here is one of the simpler illustrated editions of La Fontaine's fables.  The paper is cheap, and the drawings eminently simple.  The book's most attractive feature is that it breaks each fable into something like four to six parts, with the accompanying text for each part.  Among the best illustrations is that of the wolf carrying off the lamb on 83.  The wolf in WC has been picnicking and is so disturbed that he has knocked over his wine jug (100).  Apparently in La Fontaine, the fox and the goat both go down into the well at the same time (147-8).

Here is a little book meant for the young.  29 pages.  5¾" x 7⅜".  The colored designs are clever.  I find three especially noteworthy.  WSC (11) has one dark-skinned figure among six others, all with the same blue coat of fleece.  LM (13) puts the mouse inside the lion's mouth.  OR (23) has an Edward Munch scream on the oak's face, while the reeds bend and look up at him.  I am so happy that I took an evening in Antwerp to investigate Medimops' inexpensive offerings, delivered in Germany for free!

I am delighted to include this collection of Tessier's highly imaginative presentations of twenty-five La Fontaine fables.  Each fable gets two pages, with text on the left-hand page and a clever illustration on the right-hand page.  Fable after fable, his imagination finds lively approaches to the story.  The ant in GA is pushing a full shopping cart around the outside of a grasshopper concert!  Both the fox and the crow wear old-time French wigs as they argue their "case" in and below a tree.  We get to view the exploded parts of the frog in OF.  The two mice are enjoying burgers, hot dogs, and fries as the cat comes upon them from a fire escape outside an open window.  FS becomes a theater drama acted on a stage.  In TB, the bear is all over the traveller on the ground, who peers up from under his broad-brimmed hat.  In MM, her future dreams are shadows in the puddle of spilled milk.  This is stimulating, refreshing, creative work!  T of C at the end.

After 86 pages of contes, there are nine pages offering five fables, as the beginning T of C points out.  The fables here are: OF; GA; FC; TH, and MM.  In unusual fashion, the last page of MM is the inside back-cover.  The big art by Rochut repeats exactly his work in the 2006 Floris Books edition of "The Fables of La Fontaine."  I suspect they also repeat his work in the Auzou edition of 2009 "Les Fables de La Fontaine."  This book is both large and heavy!

This book presents one hundred numbered short wisdom stories.  I am a bit surprised to find only two fables among them, but perhaps that discovery confirms my sense that parables probe our depths while fables challenge our perceptions.  We should expect more parables than fables in a book like this.  The two fables that I find are #86, "The sun and the north wind," and #87, "Donkey in the well."  Silf tells the first without making the frequent mistake of giving away the mystery within the bet itself.  In fact, there is in this version no bet.  The result is that "the north wind subsided, and went back to the hills to think things over" (165).  The second story is like that about the fly that made butter.  The "useless" donkey who fell down the well has dirt thrown on him to bury him in the well.  Each time they throw dirt on him, he kicks it off and steps on top of it.  He gradually works his way to the top of the well.  "When life throws dirt at you, use it to rise above it."

This is a surprising book of 96 pages.  After a prologue there are 17 fables from Aesop, 9 from Samaniego; 2 from Iriarte, 2 from Leonardo da Vinci, 3 from La Fontaine, 2 from Phaedrus, and 3 "de Claris de Florian y de Hartzembuch."  A final T of C lays out these contents.  Why would Florian and Hartzembusch be put together, and why misspell the latter's name?  Every fable here has a "reflexión," and most of these reflections are almost equal in size with their stories.  Every fable also has a colored illustration.  I find these more helpful than the reflections.  I am taken with the last story from Hartzenbusch.  A starving Arab in the desert comes upon a pouch and is delighted, thinking that it contains hazel nuts.  But upon seeing them, he sadly exclaims "They are only pearls."

This is a fascinating, curious, lovely book found waiting on the counter at Daedalus as I was ready to pay for other books.  It gives a sampling of two outstanding artists of Mexican children's books: Manuel Manilla (1839-1895) and Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913).  A late chapter, "Animal Fables/Animales de fábulas," reports that fables of wolf versus fox were particularly prominent.  Besides those fables, this chapter offers illustrations, covers, and pages from "El Leon y el grillito"; "Cucarachita Monginga y raton Perez"; "La Rana y el raton"; "De la Subida mas alta y la caida mas lastimosa"; "Los Ratones tontos y el gato astuto"; and "El Grillito valeroso."  The book has a half dust-jacket, which also serves as an envelope for a little copy of "El Rey y sus tres hijos."  Lovely stuff!

This large-format pamphlet of 80 pages offers xerox patterns for handouts in classes on fables.  I find it very well done.  It is divided into five sections.  Describing and defining a fable.  Interpreting and writing fables.  Groups of fables with similar themes.  Dealing with fables creatively.  Fables from around the world.  There is a good exercise, for example, on 20: Why, for Phaedrus and again for Luther, do fables come into being?  Both fabulists provide an answer.  That question is followed by two good samples to ascribe to either fabulist.  The booklet makes excellent use of a great variety of fabulists, including a generous sprinkling of moderns.  I would love to teach this book in a class or course!

This is an impressive classroom text, inviting good reflective work with an array of Aesopic fables and other works derived from them.  The accompanying highly stylized colored cartoons are engaging.  Early fables like Aesop's "The Fox in the Well" have pupils applying some twenty-two adjectives to either the fox or the goat.  For TH, the pupil needs to describe either character.  Next we read four fox fables from Aesop and La Fontaine and are asked to track the characteristics of the fox.  Soon we are choosing our own set of five suitable fable animals and assigning three adjectives to each.  Then we follow a Wilhelm Busch fable that has the fox dividing up spoil between King Lion and a wolf.  This fable's illustration is the pamphlet's cover picture.  Perhaps one of the best of Bettzieche's cartoons is the arrogant sack of the next fable, which is promptly put in its place by the grains which it carries.  The circle widens to include a Friedrich Wolf fable about three animals that escape a pit only to fall into arguing with each other and being caught again.  By mid-book pupils work with a definition of fable and some history of Aesop.  There is even a separate answer-book for teachers.  I find this an insightful introduction to fable.  I can only wish it were in English!

Carl Sandler Berkowitz tipped me off to the existence of this book shortly after it was published, and I deeply appreciate the tip.  This scholarly paperback brings the sixty-second language to this collection.  After an introduction, there are two chapters on two tablets found at Bogazköy, Turkey in 1983 and 1985.  A philological overview of the tablets follows, succeeded by a Hurrian dictionary.  The cuneiform fonts must have made this a terribly hard book to publish!  Those wishing to go straight to the fables will do well to attend to the "continuous translations" that appear on 28, 35, 42, 46, 47, 53, 56, 61, and 68.  The "Philological Overview" in Chapter 4 provides a summary list of the nine tales on Kbo 32.12 (73) and the fourteen tales on Kbo 32.14 (74).  Some eleven pages of bibliography, labeled "References," close the book.

There is an elaborate frame story in this landscape book 9½" x 8¾".  Aesop (dog); Libbit (rabbit); Presy (fox); and the Shorties (pigs) are friends who put on plays.  Thus there are some ten books in this collection, "Aesop's Theatre Series."   In this book, Aesop writes a play showing that we have to prepare for tomorrow.  That play is the traditional fable.  The most engaging figure is Aesop as he plays the grasshopper, with violin and top hat.  This book apparently coordinates with an online program offering a media enhanced book.  Unfortunately, the online program has been retired.  AV2 has promised to substitute something more recent.  We will see what happens.  Printed in North Mankato, Minnesota.

Here is a paperbound version of a book already in the collection in a hardbound version.  That edition was in 1962 and was done in hardbound with a dust-jacket from Dodd, Mead & Company.  Now here is a paperback re-issue of the book, in fact a first printing, from Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.  One sign of the change is that the sub-title has shifted from "An Homeric Fable" to "A Homeric Fable."  As I wrote of that edition, this contemporary version follows the Homeric parody through the death of Crum-snatcher and the description of arms.   Thereafter it becomes original.  Puff-jaw the frog, avoiding a water-snake, abandons Crum-snatcher the mouse, and the latter drowns.  This incident will ultimately occasion the war.  Puff-jaw denies his part in Crum-snatcher's death.  The two sides arm.  Gwynne does a good job of making the difficult scene "realizable."  There is one great individual battle: Pond-larker versus Troglodyte.  The former dies; then rains come and end the battle.  Though I am happy to include the book in this collection, the only connection with fable continues to come in the sub-title.

This is a large-format (7" x 9¾") paperbound volume that offers 6 stories in the anime style typical of graphic novels these days: LM; FS; "The Lion Was Ill"; TH; TB; and TT.  All three elements are quite simple: the storytelling, the artistry, and the moralizing.  The book is meant for very young readers or listeners.  "The Lion Was Ill" has a good turn of phrase.  Each visitor to the sick lion is told to close the door.  Each "never comes back."  The usual sign of footsteps going in but not coming out changes here to blood on the lion's floor.  Main characters here are given proper names.  The moral for TT is "Remember whatever you must remember."  Once or twice the standard present tense lapses without reason into the past (24, 25, 47, 48, 49).

Here is another creative demonstration of how to portray an Aesopic fable in contemporary terms.  The story situates crocodile and scorpion on the edge of the river.  Scorpion asks crocodile for help in crossing the river.  Neither of them has friends, because each has always bitten those who are near.  Crocodile agrees to take scorpion across the river, provided of course that the latter not bite him along the way.  However, the scorpion cannot restrain himself and bites the crocodile.  The latter lunges at the former.  Both are heard to say "You promised not to bite me!"  As they go down to death, both say "This is all your fault!"

Here are 180 numbered bilingual fables.  Sometimes a monochrome reproduction of a Milo Winter illustration faces the two texts, English and Chinese.  There is a bilingual T of C at the beginning.  From a reading of the first fables, I would say that the transcription of the English is unusually well executed here.  A trademark of this book is the flowery brown pattern on the outside of pages.  Is that perhaps a Chinese AI at the end of the book?

Here is another publish-on-demand book.  It is meant, the back cover tells us, for students learning French.  It presents some forty fables with the English on the left and the French on the right.  That painting of "The Fox and the Heron" on the cover by Franz Snyders is quite lovely!  I am not comfortable yet with publishers who do not have a place!

This book advertises an animated video, but if one goes to the site and uses the code, one learns that offerings before 2015 are no longer available.  Apparently, one should buy another book instead!  As I wrote about our other book in this collection, GA, there is an elaborate frame story in this landscape book 9½" x 8¾".  Aesop (dog); Libbit (rabbit); Presy (fox); and the Shorties (pigs) are friends who put on plays.  "Aesop's Theatre Series."   In this book, Aesop writes a play about the wind and sun.  That play is the traditional fable.  Aesop plays the sun and wears a bright red necklace with burning light bulbs at the points of its star.  Shorties play the wind and Libbit the traveler.  The bet here,is about "who will blow off his coat first" and is proposed by the sun.  The point is "Strength isn't everything."  After the play comes a more personal application.  The light bulbs on Aesop's sun costume explode.  He experiences that he was trying to demonstrate power.  "It is better to be kind than to use force."  Descriptions, questions and key words close out the book.  There are some ten books in this collection,

This book of 8 + 21 pages gets more engaging as I have been digging into it.  My digging was occasioned by a question: Where was it published?  Though I still do not have an answer, searching led to the revelation that the five fables here are lyrics to music first performed in September, 2013, and available on Apple Music.  I have ordered the album through Amazon.  There is a sort of interior title here: "Five Fables: Based on Aesop."  The first fable plays out in traditional fashion, except that this fox first tells he crow that the cheese is too large for his beak and that the fox could chew it better.  Unsuccessful, the fox turns to flattery.  However, there is a major shift after the usual fable.  The crow thinks: What would I rather have?  A piece of cheese or the freedom to sing.  Sing she does, and the world reverberates with her song.  Meanwhile, the fox slinks off, "licking his greasy lips in silence."  Touché!  "The Frog and the Ass" is new and goes delightfully in a direction we readers of fable might predict.  TH, like FC, takes a different direction after the usual fable.  The hare in one of this fable's illustrations sports a red eye.  I will leave it to the reader of this report to image how things go in "The Mouse, the Bull and the Flea."  GA goes in a direction that La Fontaine would applaud.  The grasshopper gets the ant dancing in January.  Soon the ant is pleading with the grasshopper to play more and faster -- and the grasshopper falls and dies.  T of C at the front.  5¾" x 8¼".

John Birmingham did the art for "The Extraordinary Tug-of-War" in 1968.  That version used a text by Letta Schatz.  Now he does his own text with the same illustrations he did then.  This is a large-format (11½" x 9¼") landscape book.  Hippopotamus and elephant teased the little hare.  Hare finally had enough and went first to the elephant to propose a tug-of-war.  He gave elephant a rope and directed him to wait till he felt a tug, and then he should pull   Hare then did the same with hippopotamus.  Hare then hid between the two and tugged.  The two gigantic animals pulled all day and all night long.  Hare then snuck up on each to ask if he wanted to yield.  Each soon started to relent with comments like "You are stronger than I thought."  After a while, the two large animals pulled close enough to see each other.  Angrily, they charged around trying to find and to punish hare.  He was already far away, having proved that though he was not as strong as either, he was much more clever.  This is a nicely executed book.  The color of the art sometimes making reading the text difficult.

Here is a lovely, brief, well executed "Kalilah and Dimnah."  New to me and perfectly placed as Kalilah's warning to Dimnah is "The Hare, the Wolf, and the Fox" (22-23).  In fact, several of the stories here are new to me: "The Scorpion and the Tortoise" (26-27), "The Hawk and the Chicken" (30), "The Gardener and the Nightingale" (32-33); and "The Frog, the Crab, the Snake, and the Weasel" (46-47).  Each is strategically placed in the evolving drama.  The illustrations here are easier to track than where I have encountered them elsewhere because here they include only one scene and focus on it.  The surrealistic multi-colored background mountains from the originals are here.  So is the weird fire surrounding the "witness tree" (48).  Particularly good among the illustrations are "The Hare and the Lion" (25); the climactic battle (43); and "The Gardener and the Bear" (50).  A helpful section on 60-63 shows what the original manuscript pages and their illustrations look like.  Dimnah here starves in prison, "full of bitter regret for what he had done to Shanzabeh" (58).  What a fine book!

This is a square book about 8" on a side.  Among its fifteen stories are "The Emperor's New Clothes," retold by Susanna Davidson, and GA, retold by Leslie Sims.  Mike and Carl Gordon illustrate the former and Merel Eyckerman the latter.  There is something of Quentin Blake in the funny drawings for the former.  They do several stories and do them well.   The accent in GA is less on singing and more on avoiding work.  The ant here immediately invites the grasshopper in to get warm and to eat.  The art has a laid-back quality that suits this story perfectly, by contrast with the Gordons' busy style.  It is curious that the back cover claims that the publisher is Educational Development Corporation in Tulsa.  The book's final pages reveal that it was first published by Usborne Books in London.  This book is remarkably heavy.

I visited this monthly flea-market as a part of a visit with my cousin Barb, and there in the middle of the market was an Usborne representative selling books at non-flea-market prices.  I have enjoyed Usborne books for a long time and was happy to find three new fable books.  This is a squat edition, 6" x 7¾" with puffy covers.  Its 272 pages are divided into eight categories, with three to six stories in each group.  The categories are Pride, Trickery, Greed, Quarrels, Friendship, Cunning, Retorts, and Comeuppance.  I tried the first several.  The story versions are good and filled out nicely with picturesque details.  All but TH are well thought through.  Davidson has the hare deliberately nap, planning on making the race competitive when the turtle catches up near the end.  The illustrations are charming and colorful.  FC on 14 is a good example.  The book is physically heavy.  I am confused because the colophon page claims "First printed in America in 2013," while the back cover says "Printed in Guangdong, China."

Here is a beautifully produced book, with a fox peering out of a hole on the inside front-cover while his tail protrudes from a hole on the inside back-cover.  The front-cover gives a good sense of the fables and other stories to come, as animals surround the central print data.  116 pages.  36 fables.  I recognize many traditional Aesopic fables, like the "Found Hatchet" (11); "The Fox and the Goat" (18); "Two Goats" (45); and "The Ass's Shadow" (48).  There are more, and they are graced with lively illustrations, usually beginning with a suggestive small symbol.  WC is adapted here to include a lion (67).  FC seems to feature a sausage rather than cheese (71).  I think I recognize "The Boy and the Filberts" (102.  This book has been carefully prepared and produced!  The stories seem to range beyond Aesopic fables to include Jewish and Arabic stories, some perhaps taken from Maimonides' biography, "The Rambam."

This is a lively book.  Markus has imagined the fables' stories afresh.  He thus comes up with a line I cannot remember hearing for one of his earliest fables.  The miser whose buried gold was stolen hears from the neighbor: "When the gold was there, you had it not" (25).  Even more, Markus directs the fables here specifically to writers.  What might have been labeled a "moral" elsewhere here becomes "Aesop's Tip," and it is specific to writers.  For example, after the fable about a fox and goat in a well, "Aesop's Tip" is "Look before you leap.  Before accepting a writing assignment, make sure to understand the expectations and the audience.  Don't be afraid to ask questions " (30).  For each of the thirty-five fables, there are then several "Writing Prompts."  For "The Fox and the Goat," these include writing a "trapped trickster traps foolish helper" modern story, writing an alternate fable in which the goat escapes, and rewriting with new characters in a modern city.  The illustrations for each of the thirty-five contribute by pointing towards the "Tip."  The mother monkey, for example, on 56 has an appropriate look of chagrin for this fable and her child an appropriate look of fear as he is cradled protectively by her arms.  The book adds eleven additional fables with only writing prompts.  Further sections are "Writing Games and Exercises" and "Worksheets."  This may be the first "print-on-demand" book I can recommend to people.  I also celebrate because it happens to be the 8000th book catalogued in this collection.

This book amounts to a happy revelation for me.  The happy revelation is twofold.  First, someone else finds fable a wonderful way to get into reading and writing!  In this case, this teacher's handbook is meant for teachers of the third and fourth grades.  It is the first of twelve such handbooks that take teachers and pupils through six years of training in rhetoric and writing.  The second revelation is that the classical tradition of rhetorical progymnasmata continues.  That tradition has to do with enjoying models and learning from them; it also has to do with creating on one's own after enjoying the great work of others.  In this handbook, I find fourteen lessons.  I take it that a lesson covers about a week of learning.  Two important exercises in each week are "Tell it back" and "Talk about it."  Each of the fourteen weeks involves a particular fable.  Two of the weeks are concerned with fables that the pupils themselves create.  The other weeks use well-known fables, starting with LM in the first week.  Each lesson has its proper visual imagery, which is used through the lesson.  I probably hoped for helpful images in this book.  I received rather the valuable lesson to use sustained iconography in dealing with a particular fable.  Indeed, the best image in the book may be FG on the cover!  I would love to try teaching this book to children sometime!  And I would love to hear or learn in particular how the experiment works of asking pupils to create fables of their own.

Everything about this book is big and lively.  11¼" square with a CD in the center of its cover.  The selection of fables suggests which fables are best known these days.  Each two-page narratives is in prose with several scenes from the fable worked into the design of the two-page spread.  There are several creative elements interpreting the fables.  Thus the heron is blue by the time he settles in after his hungry day.  The tortoise in TH turns back to us at the finish line, in sunglasses and sun hat, and flashes us the victory sign.  In OF, it seems that three frogs are blowing themselves up. The narrative focuses on one, who is happy that her ploy is working.  She is getting bigger, until….  The grasshopper singer is decked out in fir and sandals and plays the cymbals while she sings..  The CD offers a good, fast, lively recitation with good animal sound effects.  This is a good French Canadian contribution to the collection!

Through a mistake, I ordered a second copy of this gorgeous book before I had opened the first.  Now I notice that this second copy has a printing date of 2014, while the first was printed in 2013.  I will repeat what I wrote there.  I first noticed the beauty of this book as I enjoyed "Les Fables de La Fontaine Illustrées par les Plus Grand Artistes" published in 2015 by Circonflexe.  Imagine my surprise a few days later as I opened some unopened packages of books.  I had ordered it five months earlier.  This large format (11" x 14¼") book is very impressive!  As the closing T of C shows, there are here fifteen of La Fontaine's fables.  Each is presented in a sequence of four pages.  A stiff blank colored page on the left is followed by a title-page with several cutouts of major figures or objects in the fable.  Through those cutouts in the stiff white page one starts to see portions of the colorful decoupage art work for the fable.  One turns the page, and the stiff white page has La Fontaine's text arranged around the cutouts with a verse or two repeated in enlarged bold print.  The fourth page presents the decoupage, a large single-colored "Scheerenschnitte" cutout against a background of the first page's color.  Several colorful elements are then pasted upon the large cutout.  Three things make this book so special.  The first is the decoupage page.  Fornage's sense of color and his gift for design make these artworks glorious!  The sheer size of the background cutout gives the artist room to present cultural context with just enough color to let the highlighted scenes stand out.  The second feature is the cutout page.  I did not expect this element!  The cutouts repeat several elements from the larger art work.  These same figures are used also in a fine silhouette procession across the book's endpapers.  Thirdly, each fable is set in one French geographic context, identified in the T of C.  One rises from the fable at the bottom of the decoupage into a presentation of the region.  For example, the first fable, FS, presents a peasant home in Alsace and offers peasants who live there, with their children and animals.  This scheerenschnitte is, by the way, a true exemplar in that it was cut to present matching mirror images around a symmetrical center.  Only the pasted-in fox and wolf are not symmetrical.  The two pots they lean on are!  Among the decoupages, my prizes would go to the simplest, like FS, FC, and OR.  The best cutout is surely the lion in LM.  What fun!

Here is the English translation of "Was Tiere miteinander reden: 30 Naturfabeln in Gedichtform" from Oratio publishers in 2004.  That edition already had the illustrations of Kilian Beck.  The book thus becomes an even more international endeavor.  The German edition was published in Schaffhausen, Switzerland and printed in Komamo, Slovakia.  I wrote on that edition that this is a curious book in several ways.  Its texts were written by a man apparently born ninety-nine years ago.  Its illustrations were done by a young man of 13 years.  Its texts are mostly newly created.  Three late titles add a parenthesis mentioning La Fontaine as inspiration.  Generally texts are arranged on one page -- especially the right -- and the fable's illustration on the facing page.  The fables seem gentle and perceptive, as when the cicada first asks the butterfly to make music with her wings and then learns that the butterfly wants to dance to the cicada's music.  The ant is delivering a long lecture to the snail that has slimed its path, but the snail only retires into its internal kitchen to create more slime for tomorrow.  The fish tries to be an "airfish"; not flying in air but swimming in water is its life.  The sparrow that sees the swallow flying high is at first envious but learns that its life is to hop around on earth.  This copy was published upon demand in Monee, IL.

Sixty-four stories get one partial-page black-and-white design each.  The stories are standard Aesopic offerings.  The book is a solid inexpensive paperback.  I found several in the series while I was in the Oxford Bookstore in Kolkata.  This copy is marked down 10 rupees as an introductory offer.  There is a T of C for the numbered stories at the beginning.  All are familiar stories, even when told with some variations.  Several, e.g. "The Two Goats" (50), are variants of stories appearing in other books in the series.  The same is true for MSA (58), which here features a washerman, his son, and a bundle of clothing, as in "Popular Stories from Panchatantra."  The cover features a beautiful falling blue and yellow tortoise from TT!  He is asking "Ohh, why I ever can't shut my mouth."  There is a crease in the front cover.

Forty-four stories get one -- and often more -- partial-page black-and-white designs each.  The stories are mostly standard Aesopic offerings.  The book is a solid inexpensive paperback.  I found several in the series while I was in the Oxford Bookstore in Kolkata.  This copy is marked down 10 rupies as an introductory offer.  There is a T of C for the numbered stories at the beginning.  Almost all are familiar stories, even when told with some variations.  Several, e.g., "Friendship of the Owl and the Swan" (90) and and "Brainless Donkey" (93), are variants of stories appearing in other books in the series.  New to me are "Palms Without Hair" (21), "The Clever Prince" (100), and "The Sage and the Snake" (137).  "The Greedy Man" (43) has a man walking an extra kilometer time after time to get a cheaper coconut.  It turns out that the cheapest coconut is the one he brings down from the tree, but he suffers multiple injuries in a fall.  The bear of the usual tale about smashing a friend's head to kill a fly here is a monkey bodyguard for a king (128).

The title-page has "Moral Story of Grandpa."  Fifty-two stories get generally one partial-page black-and-white design each.  The stories are mostly standard Aesopic offerings.  The book is a solid inexpensive paperback.  I found several in the series while I was in the Oxford Bookstore in Kolkata.  This copy is marked down 10 rupies as an introductory offer.  There is a T of C for the numbered stories at the beginning.  Almost all are familiar stories, even when told with some variations.  Several, e.g. GGE (5) and "The Blue Fox" (117), are variants of stories appearing in other books in the series.  In "The Two Goats" here, they agree that one will walk over the sitting other, and both can arrive (20).  New to me are "Jungles Without Animals" (57) and "Choosing the Next Ruler" (98).  "The Boy and the Barber" (74) is a funny story of a boy who fools with a barber by asking for a shave.  The barber lathers him up but then waits on other customers.  "When will I get my shave?"  "When you grow your beard!"  In "The Magical Sticks" (106), a clever king threatens five servants, one of whom is certainly a thief, by giving each a stick.  "The thief's stick will grow two inches by tomorrow."  Of course, the thief cuts his stick down and is thereby easily found out.

Thirty-two stories get generally one partial-page black-and-white design each.  The stories are standard Panchatantra offerings.  The book is a solid inexpensive paperback.  I found several in the series while I was in the Oxford Bookstore in Kolkata.  This copy is marked down 10 rupies as an introductory offer.  There is a T of C for the numbered stories at the beginning.  Almost all are familiar stories, even when told with some variations.  New to me is the story of an argument between a thief and a ghost who are both out to victimize the same person.  They awaken that person and he escapes (56)  Also new to me are "The Giant & the Thief" (51), "The Clever Jackal" (94), "Beating for Gold" (105), "The Importance of Company" (110), "The Ailing Prince and the Wise Princess" (118), and "The Brahmin & the Elf" (141).  The version of MSA here has a washerman as its protagonist, and a huge bundle of clothes is part of the fun of switching what is on the donkey (98).

This book is close to the nadir in trendy publishing.  The good news is that it offers Townsend's texts in readable form.  The less good news includes the simple setup of the book:  pages typed onto or scanned into a computer come out looking boring after the boring fifteen pages of T of C.  The computer's formatting got confused on the top of 46 and no one caught the indent and change to italics.  There is open space for no apparent reason at the top of 43.  The "footnotes" are delivered at the end in a fashion perhaps easier for a scanner or computer to perform but not easier for readers to deal with.  A cataloguer is grateful to Amazon for listing online the publisher and date of publication, neither listed here.  A disappointing book for $20.  Our alert cataloguer, Jeanette Hilton, noticed that both the interior content and the publisher are identical in this book and "My First Big Book of Aesop's Fables," published in the same year. What is different in the two books? The cover image, the title, and the place of the publish

This is a wonderfully serious and substantial book.  It features three artistically distinct segments, each with the work of a particular artist.  The first third (14-67) deals with cartoonlike panels representing -- as do the other two thirds -- traditional Aesopic fables.  A fine example is FG on 12-13.  The second third (68-121) uses exaggerated broad strokes and geometric shapes to cover a full page or more with a single illustration to dramatize a fable.  A good example shows the tortoise climbing over the sleeping hare on 70-71.  The third section (122-178) has a softer, pastel palette.  The large illustrations here invite perhaps more reflection.  A good example is the wolf on 179 holding his nose while a frisky horse runs off on the facing page.  I have waited almost five years to catalogue this book.  It is worth waiting for!  About 8½" x 11½".

This is a strange book.  It is yet another reprint of Rackham and Jones' 1912 version, one of the flood that has come since, apparently, the copyright ran out in 1987.  The book is printed upon demand in Columbia, SC.  I have not been able to find how Ukray is involved.  I selected five images not signed by Rackham and checked each, and each is in the original 1912 version.  This is not the first time I was fooled, by incorrect or absent information, into buying a book that our collection does not need!  The back cover declares that Aesop's "fame is all the more deserved because he never deserved it."

Here is a highly unusual book!  The first thing to say of it is that John Boose and his friends had fun putting together this book!  It takes fables to quite new and weird places -- and enjoys doing so.  Sometimes there is a slight change in the text, as advertised in the title.  More frequently, there is a significant "deviation" in the photo attached to the text.  Often the deviation has to do with alcohol, as when the fox, frustrated at not getting the grapes, says that they are sour and adds "I should just go back home and have a delicious cocktail" (1).  Before offering some examples, I make one last observation.  By contrast with many innovative people transforming fables, Boose takes on a huge quantity of them.  By my count, it is something like 286 "deviated" fables on 283 pages.  The titles of the beginning fables give a sense of their wit.  After "The Fox, the Grapes, and the Delicious Cocktail," we find "The Moose that Made the Golden Kegs," "The Thieves and the Toaster," and "The Dolphins, the Whales, and the Zombie Penguins."  The photographs are generally humorously staged, often enough apparently at parties.  There is a T of C at the beginning.  The back cover continues the fun by doing a small print collection of apparently all the morals, including this one in the middle: "Attempt not impossibilities."  Print upon demand.

The 2014 version of this book has changed some of its technical data from the data in the 2001 version by the same publisher.  The data is found on the last page of print.  What has changed?  The copyright date is now 2009.  The ISBN number has changed.  The price has gone up from 7,000 to 9,000 won.  As I wrote then, this book presents eighty-nine fables in English on left-hand pages facing Korean on right-hand pages.  There are occasional cartoons along the way, besides the ever-present fox on the upper right-hand side of the page.  Most fables include a "key" line after the English text introducing idioms and vocabulary.  A bilingual T of C at the beginning numbers the fables.  A quick, random reading catches the error "seep" for "sleep" on 72 and a repetition of "man will" on 208.  These errors remain in this later version.  SW is told in the better form (94).

Dover republication of the 1924 original from John Martin's Book House.  As always with Dover, well done!  The illustrations come out bright and lively.  The illustrations are the same size as in the original, but the slightly larger margins set them off well.  As I wrote of the original edition, I enjoy the illustration style here, and the fables are versified, with one or two (e.g. MM) even song-ified.  Perhaps the best for use in a show would be LM.  Interspersed poems often reinforce the morals of the fables.  Repeaters from John Martin's Big Book include CP and "The Reed and the Oak."  Now in 1996 I have done a thorough study of the book's twenty-three fables.  There are no surprises in the stories here.  Rather the versions are quite faithful to the tradition, but they seem considerably padded and even wordy.  They tend to be moralistic; the crow's vanity over stealing cheese, e.g., "makes honest children wonder."  Oh?  "The Misguided Ass" may be Martin's best text.

This is a new standard-setter for inexpensive classic editions.  Barnes & Noble had presented a Rackham edition as recently as 2005 and a Griset edition in 2012.  Here they put them together with Crane in a lavish book with gilt edges, a bookmark, and faux-leather binding beautifully finished in gold, brown and white.  I regret that the texts seem unattributed, and I am surprised by "Fairy Story" on 318 with an illustration from Griset.  There is a list of illustrations at the front of the book.  Perhaps two of the best rendered are the first two: TMCM (frontispiece) and TH (internal title-page).  Might these two actually come from an illustrator other than the three named?  There is an AI on 453.  Colored illustrations abound!

Here is an engaging print-upon-demand book from a fascinating author.  Bruce Saunders, the back cover reveals, is a retired sociologist with a BA from Reed and a doctorate in sociology from Berkeley.  His stories are one step more concrete and personal than traditional Aesopic fables, but they have much of the same wisdom.  I have read the first dozen or so.  They represent a philosophy of enlightened coexistence.  The Mexican Cowboy, who figures in almost all of these fables, feeds other creatures but they know, as Fable #14 tells us, that he will stop doing so if they attack another in his presence.  That fable, "Two of Life's Big Rules," tells us that the two rules are "Learn and eat."  Not bad!  A good sample fable is #2, "Runaway Sheep."  Coyote's howling ends up protecting the sheep from the mountain lion, who fears that there are several coyotes.  Coyote, another favorite figure here, even offers to take the sheep to the Cowboy, who will feed and protect them.  When the sheep praise the coyote, he tells them that if there had been only one sheep, he would have eaten him.  Fable #3 has Coyote learning that prey he has captured will be eaten by buzzards while he seeks other prey.  So he proclaims out loud that he will use buzzards as his prey, and they take the hint.  I would enjoy reading even more of these stories.

I count 30 fables and 7 black-and-white illustrations in this 5" x 8" book of 37 pages,  MM (18),  CP (23), and TH (28) show specific fable scenes.  There is a pack animal and his driver on 13.  Other images are of single individuals not involved in a fable incident..  With that information I believe I have exhausted what I can say about this paperback book in Marshallese, a subset of Micronesian language.  I wonder what the early T of C indicates with its seven sections.  Maybe somewhere in my future I will run into someone from the Marshall Islands and get just a little more information on this book!

This paperbound book is parallel to the 2016 Cautionary Fables & Fairytales: Asia Edition: Old Tales of Magic and Woe.  This copy adds the subtitle "Old Tales of Magic and Woe" only on its back cover, not on either the title-page or the front cover.  I again find the stories on the border of fable.  Like that book, this is a "graphic novel" including, as the beginning T of C shows, 15 stories rendered in black-and-white.  I sampled four of them and found good stories, none of them classic fables.  "The Jackal and the Wolf" (67) starts telling a story and then translates it into doomed action.  "Frog and Snake Never Play Together" (69) is a sad story of two young people warned against playing with those whom their parents deem to be enemies.  It asks what would happen if they had not been so warned.  "The Girl Who Married a Lion" (161) puts a theory to test.  "Is sister's husband a lion?  Let us put their two sons in a cage and see if a lion attacks them."  The lion attacks, and so everyone can apparently be sure that their father is not a lion.  Hmmmm….  "Concerning the Hawk and the Owl" (169) may be closest to a classic fable.  The hawk has been awarded the right to choose his favorite prey with impunity.  He learns that it is better to attack chickens than owls.  The former scream but do nothing; the latter are silent but attack back in the dark of night.  While the Asia book was published by Amazon's own company for "comiXology," I can find no claim by whoever published this book.  The Ebay listing gives Kel McDonald as the publisher.  Did Amazon see a good thing and buy him out?

This smaller edition is based on Neugebauer's original edition of 2000.  Our collection has Neugebauer's English from the same year.  This smaller (5¾" x 7 ¼") book seems to reproduce the entire original.  As I wrote of our English copy, this is a lovely book.  Neugebauer again here offers something well thought through and well executed.  Various birds start by bickering about who can fly the highest.  The eagle contradicts the other birds; the first illustration of the eagle glistens beautifully with light.  Various birds can fly only so high and then must return to the earth.  The ostrich welcomes them back and encourages them for having done as well as nature intended.  The art zooms out nicely as the birds fly higher.  In the end, the other birds can see only one bird left, the eagle.  As the eagle is soaring, the wren creeps out of his feathers in another dramatic illustration.  The wren flies upward; as she does so, the eagle tries to match her but is too tired.  She assures him that he has won the contest and mentions that she could not have flown so high by herself.  The owl congratulates both for setting a new record together.  I am particularly impressed with the positive transformation of the ancient fable, which is about outdoing others.  Here each contributes to a new achievement.

This is a delightful presentation of the Märchen picked up and made famous by the Brothers Grimm.  Peter Kunstreich anthropomorphizes the characters beautifully.  I can see why the note facing the title page describes him as beloved by children.  That note adds perceptively:  "Vor allem seine Tierfiguren ermöglichen Kindern einen humorvollen Blick auf die ach so ernste Moral der Erwachsenen."  Perhaps the most telling illustration here is the double-page showing the morning encounter between hare and hedgehog: arrogance versus down-to-earth friendliness.  The hedgehog needs just an hour to execute his plan.  The hare runs 73 laps before collapsing on the 74th.  Bravo, Kunstreich!

Here is the German version of a pop-up book I first found five yeas ago in Paris.  As I wrote about it, there are here six exquisite pop-ups: TH, OR, "The Fox and the Goat," "The Heron," FS, and WL.  Dedieu's special gift is to create depth by getting four or five layers into the pop-up picture.  Among his best efforts is "The Fox and the Goat," which gives a goat's-eye-view of the fox appearing at the top of the well.  In each case, the fable text is presented on the left and the right of the central pop-up picture.  Exquisite work!

I have already come into contact with Dedieu's excellent work, and have just ordered several of his books in French and German.  Here is the German translation of his book by Seuil in 2009: "Le Cerf se Voyant dans l'Eau et Autres Fables."  The pop-ups are again exquisite.  Dedieu's special gift is to create depth by getting four or five layers into the pop-up picture.  Among his best efforts is the title pop-up, which plays with reflection and dimensionality. The background of DW suggests a net.  That suggestion is perfect for this fable about confinement and freedom. Another great use of dimensionality occurs in "The Rabbits and the Frogs," as the frogs leaping into the water become the backdrop for our viewing of the rabbit.  In each case, the fable text is presented on the left and the right of the central pop-up picture.  Exquisite work!  The book has a solid feel often lacking in pop-up books.

This is my kind of fable book!  Each fable gets a text of La Fontaine; a large, engaging, and often surprising illustration; and a post-it note.  These notes are the special gift of this book.  They go in several directions to present afterthoughts on the fable.  Many ask if the two contenders could not find a way to be friends.  Work together.  Enjoy both sides.  The first four of the fifty fables presented here are excellent examples.   Can the ant not enjoy driving a motorcycle with the cicada in the sidecar?  Can the fox and crow not divide the cheese?  Could the ox help the frog for some moments to blow himself up and feel good about himself without having to die?  Are businessmen in their white shirts not like the watchdog letting themselves be chained?  Can they not also, maybe just for a short time, be wolves too?  The cartoon art, a full-page for each fable, is perfectly suited to this approach; it often portrays the alternative presented by the post-it note.  FG is a good example (52).  The post-it note complains of those girls who reject us and our love, and the illustration has a fox using hot-air balloons to get up to the level of the grapes.  What fun!  9¼" square.  132 pages.  Becquet describes himself as "peintre bédériste, sociétaire des Artistes Français," which I cannot yet understand.  The book contains other work from his gallery.  Is he the publisher of the book?

Here is a well made large-format (8¼" x 11¾") set of materials for a teacher of 9 and 10 year old pupils.  This pedagogical work has two major sections: reading and learning fables first, and then creating and reforming them second.  Some fifty well known fables are scattered throughout the work.  Questions are answered by encountering fables themselves: How do I recognize a fable?  What are some well known fables?  What are some less known fables?  What are some verse fables?  Are there some fables in which animals do not appear?  Further subsections in the first part then handle animal fables; English-language fables; fables in which the same animals appear, specifically lion and fox; and multiple versions of LM.  The second major sections plays well with fables and with creating and reforming fables.   The first few pages of the two major sections are given to tips for teachers.  The majority of the section then consists of copy-ready pages to reproduce for the pupils.  The black-and-white cartoons support the pedagogy well.  I would enjoy teaching this booklet!

This unlucky purchase represents some of what is wrong with "print on demand" publishing.  I had noticed the book long ago on Amazon.com and had been curious what John Quincy Adams was doing as a writer or editor of fables, but I have been surprised more than once in my collecting of fable editions.  At last I had to purchase  the book to find my answer.  The page added before the title-page of this reprint has this and only this: "Fables Choisies, Mises en Vers.  John Quincy Adams, Jean de La Fontaine, John Adams Library (Boston Public Library)."  It thus apparently turns out that this book is a copy of a standard, unillustrated, unspectacular French edition of Jean de La Fontaine's fables which happens to be in the John Adams Library in the Boston Public Library.  Nowhere is there any explanation of how Adams' name is associated with this book.  The original was published by Jean-François Bastien in Paris in 1779, a curious time in history and one in which the Adams family would have had an interest in what was going on in France.  I suppose I have to put down 2014 as the publication date.  This book was printed five days after I finally ordered it.

Here are forty-three fables presented by an artist I have enjoyed twice elsewhere.  The book's unusual shape (6½" x 10¾") is the first clue that it is going to present traditional material in a fresh way.  Almost every presentation involves two pages and clever positioning of a few key images.  GA (10-11) presents an ant with a sack of grain on his back marching across the page above a grasshopper moving upwards with a guitar on his back: character, load, and direction are all different.  FC presents a cheese with its owner's name struck through and changed from "Corbeau" to "Renard" (12-13).  WS shows a stork with a scissors for a head beside an x-ray of a wolf's digestive tract with the bone lodged down the throat (22-23).  The spilt milk of MM is blotting out drawings of hens, pig, and cow (30-31).  The surreal style fits the approach perfectly.  Sometimes I have no idea why an object is presented the way Jarrie presents it; other times it is perfect.  The bull in OF holds the frog by a tether as though the latter were a helium-filled balloon (32-33).  Maybe best of all is "The Rat and the Elephant" (50-51).  The elephant is segmented to make room for the text.  Between the elephant's legs, mostly hidden from us, a cat reaches out a paw for the minuscule rat under the elephant's big belly.  For sheer fun, try "The Lion Defeated by a Man" (78-79).  The book has a place-holding ribbon, a short life of both La Fontaine and of Jarrie, and a helpful glossary of unusual language in the fables.  This book fulfills its rear cover's promise of a fresh entry into a fabulous zoological park.  Bravo, Jarrie!

Tagore is a favorite author for me as a writer of poems bearing on the spiritual life.  I was thus surprised to see him presented as a writer of fables.  Alas, I fear that what is in this paperback book is not fables as I understand "fable."  A T of C would have helped me realize that there are three longer works here, perhaps short stories or Novellen.  I have to save enjoying them for a later time.  For now, I include the book in the collection as a help to me and others who may expect something different from the book's title.

This is a paperback book of some 182 pages featuring, in black-and-white, Velasquez' portrait of Aesop and many of Milo Winter's illustrations.  A curious fact about the book seems to be that it is already out of print, something like one year after publication.  Another curious fact about the book is that it seems to have cost originally $1.  A worthy project would be to compare and contrast Knight's adaptation with the original texts coming, as I suppose, from Winter.  The cover features a black-and-white profile of a lion with the moon looking like a coin in his nose!

As the back cover celebrates, here are 30 of La Fontaine's most celebrated fables, illustrated with a bright palette and simple, even geometric, forms.   To my surprise, there is no foreword or explanation.  The cover is a bright yellow background with strong red and orange forms depicting UP, found also on 9.  Among the best illustrations, I believe, are "The Rat and the Elephant" (15), "The Rabbit and the Frogs" (19), FC (25), "The Fox and the Goat" (33), and "The Heron" (41).  There is a T of C at the conclusion.  La Fontaine keeps prompting highly creative approaches to his fables!

This booklet of 29 pages presents seven psychological studies.  The central character is in each case a tree.  A lively front cover has a group of people eager to burn down a tree.  There are frequent grammatical errors that make reading hard.  The author describes "a set of stories that depict some of the most meaningful lessons of modern times with simple and direct messages for children" (5).

Here is an ephemeral object just made for a collection like this!  Mrs. Bollen's Class was at Cottage Hill Elementary School in Grass Valley, CA.  This print-on demand book of 56 pages gives two pages to each pupil's fable, with a colored picture on the left and a text, with title and author's first name, on the right.  A frequent moral is "Treat others the way you want to be treated."  In Daphne's "Fox and Lion" (10), a replay of LM, fox and lion form an organization to go around and take down animal traps."  The cover shows "The Bunny and the Doe," done by Allison (52).

Here is an excellent resource.  Júlia Sabaté Font has translated the first 471 fables in B.E. Perry's "Aesopica."  There is a numbered T of C at the end.  From a small sampling, I find the translations right on target.  It is a pleasure to encounter a careful book translating primary sources!

I had a day free for book-hunting and other fun in Chicago and I walked over from Taylor Street to Pilsen.  There I found a small community bookshop, "pilsen comm-unity books."  There I found this book, not labeled as a fable but a fable nonetheless.  Worms gather to resist the plucking of one worm by a bird.  A cat and then a dog gather in this tug-of-war between above-the-surface animals and a number of below-the-surface worms.  Finally one worm gets the idea of biting the dog's tail.  The dog, cat, and bird all begin to bicker, and the worms go free.  Of course the bookmark that comes with the book is a serpentine worm!

This pamphlet comes from a series of eight, four "Skasky" and four "Basni" or fables.  "Monkey and Spectacles" features an older woman monkey who knows not what to do with her glasses at home or out in the fields.  The book's middle pages give a frightening glimpse of how big a pug is in comparison with an elephant.  "Wolf and Fox" is less known.  A well-fed fox is luxuriating near her well-stocked larder when a famished wolf comes by.  The fox offers him all the hay he wants.  Hay is not what this wolf wants!  "We are very generous with things that are no use to us!"

This pamphlet comes from a series of eight, four "Skasky" and four "Basni" or fables.  The pike wears a captain's hat as he swims in his direction.  The fox reaching for grapes is in a fiery red dress.  The nightingale wears a natty bowtie, while the ass is dressed as a peasant.  The bear looks on musing as the monkey points to the ugly person in the mirror – of course himself!

This pamphlet duplicates one published earlier by the same publishing house in 2011.  As I wrote there, these are children's pamphlets of 12 pages, 6¼" x 9".  This pamphlet contains five fables: "The Cock and the Cuckoo"; "The Ass and the Nightingale"; "The Monkey and the Spectacles"; "Quartet"; and "The Monkey and the Mirror."  The illustrations are, for a young children's booklet, typically energetic and emphatic.  The year of publication is given after each fable.  "Quartet" is pictured on the cover.

This pamphlet duplicates one published earlier by the same publishing house in 2011.  As I wrote there, these are children's pamphlets of 12 pages, 6¼" x 9".  This pamphlet contains five fables: FC; WC; FG; WL; and "The Lion and the Fox."  The last of these is excellent: the three illustrations match the short fable perfectly.  People who impress us at first may turn out to be quite ordinary.  The illustrations are, for a young children's booklet, typically energetic and emphatic.  The year of publication is given after each fable.  FC is pictured on the cover.

I sought and ordered this book at the time when I found a 1925 first edition of this whimsical masterpiece.  I wanted to have freer rein to investigate than a fragile first edition would allow.  And the investigating has been delightful!  It starts with a dust-jacket cover and book-cover that I do not understand.  A mouse holds a candle?  At least it marks in English along its border "Aesops Fables."  There are 23 fables here, each receiving four pages.  The first left-hand page offers a title, almost always in Japanese, with a large black-and-white design, already often whimsical.  We turn that page – backwards, of course, to our reckoning – and we find a three-colored two-page depiction of a high moment in the story.  Turn again, and there is, apparently, a full page of Japanese text of the story.  Thus, after introductory material like the frontispiece and T of C, for the 23 fables there are 96 pages.  There are three full-color full-page illustrations: for "The Fox and the Woodcutter," "Doctor Cat," and the frontispiece of Aesop blowing animals out of a big horn!  My prizes for the two-page spreads go to "The Fox and the Woodcutter" and MSA.  Other excellent spreads are SW, WL, FS, TMCM, FG, GA, MM, OR, and FC.  Two fables near the center are hard for me to figure out, involving perhaps, respectively, a hawk and a rabbit (37-44).  The variety in art forms is one of the many things that make this such a special book!

I have been aware of this book for several years and have wondered about it, but its price seemed beyond our reach.  There is presently a copy on Ebay, for example, for about $125.  I was happy to find this much less expensive copy.  It was published in connection with an exhibit of Northcote's fables at the Yale Center for British Art.  The book has some 166 colored illustrations.  The final two chapters of this oversized book are given to the fables.  Part of Mark Ledbury's point is that Northcote worked in a kind of presentation that has become very popular today, what we would probably called multimedia.  Many of Northcote's pieces are described here by Ledbury as "pen and ink with hand-cut collaged engravings."  Harvey did his wood engravings from these collaged works by Northcote himself.  Even a cursory glimpse of the illustrations of Northcote and Harvey shows how much the latter relied on the former for his basic conception of many of the fables' scenes.  As the flyleaf proclaims, "Idiosyncratic, personal, and visionary, the Fables serve as a lens through which to examine Northcote's long, complex, and fruitful artistic career."  Northcote gives a sense of the collaboration that went into his illustrated first edition:  "Of the Numerous embellishments of these fables I claim but a small part of the merit.  Although the original invention and designs for the prints are my own, yet they have been most excellently drawn on blocks and prepared for the engraver by Mr William Harvey, one of the most distinguished Artists in his profession; and many of the designs even have been improved by his skill."  This volume concerns itself particularly with the manuscript of Northcote's first volume, published in 1828, distinct from the second volume, published posthumously in 1833.  This fascinating and beautiful book makes me want to do a project sometime soon on what Northcote did with the fable genre. 

Here is a pleasing new translation of about half of La Fontaine's fables, together with some twenty-three of Gustave Doré's translations.  Betts' introduction is helpful, giving a sense of La Fontaine's popularity and success with a significant chain of patrons and patronesses.  "Diversité, c'est ma devise," though apparently meant by La Fontaine to refer to his love life, characterizes well his poetry.  Betts rightly emphasizes that a collection of fables like La Fontaine's -- by contrast with, say, the Pancatantra's connecting story -- needs diversity and surprise.  Betts does well to warn readers not to expect to find La Fontaine's opinion through reading the fables.  The one subject on which La Fontaine's fables may give a clear expression of the author's beliefs is poetry itself.  Betts rightly sees the first fable, GA, as expressing well the service the artist performs in society.  I notice a couple of surprising omissions: Norman Spector from the prominent translators and J.J. Grandville from the most important artists.  The few rhyming fables I have read here impress me.  A good example of a successful translation is, I believe, GA itself.  I would say of it what Betts says of La Fontaine: not a word is wasted.  The notes are helpful, and there is an AI at the back of the book.  I would be tempted to use this for the study of La Fontaine in my next fable course.  Might Oxford add a paperback version?

Apparently originally done by Éditions Piccolia in France in 2014.  There is an AI at the end and on the back of the dust-jacket.  There are about seventy fables here, many with a full-page illustration in this extra-large format (11¼" x 15") volume.  The art is big and challenging.  A first favorite is TMCM (15) with its delightfully contrasted rats, who also appear on the back of the dust-jacket.  The wine bottle behind them in the full-page illustration comes from "Chateau La Fontaine"!  Sometimes the artist takes questionable liberties, as when the about-to-explode frog is on top of the top-hat on top of the ox's head (11)!  OR gets one of the largest tree-faces I have witnessed (30).  AD is helped by giving the artist a viewpoint that can see both above and below water-level (38).  This fully-dressed ant really is drowning!  FK's first king turns out to be a wooden head sticking up above the surface of the pond (44-45).  The swan pleading for its life is already cooking in the cook's pot (58)!  The ass carrying relics is indeed proud (84)!  The stag seeing himself in the water is both proud and dapper (101)!  125 pages.  There seems to be no recognition of the translator who created the Italian verse here.

Here is an inexpensive paperback version with good printings of Doré's illustrations, all 585 of them, as the title-page reminds us: 89 full-page compositions, 248 large designs preceding fables, and 248 vignettes after the fables.  I am surprised to see this quality and size (8½" x 11") of a book printed upon demand.  TMCM is featured on the front cover.

At first I was prepared to write that the style here was familiar from Vestita's 2018 book from the same press, "The Most Beautiful Fables of Aesop, Phaedrus and La Fontaine."  A little investigating showed that the illustrations in the present volume are the exact illustrations used for the twelve La Fontaine fables there.  La Fontaine's poetry is made here into a simpler prose version for today's children. There is something nicely geometric about Vestita's figures, including her human faces.  One of Vestita's strongest images here is of the crow decked out with peacock feathers (74).  He is a tour de force!  As happened in the other volume, this book finishes with the best tailless fox that I have seen!

Here is a paperback version of a hardbound book first published in 2012.  For a print-on-demand book, it is exceedingly well done.  It represents, I believe, a huge help to a fable student like me.  In each of several chapters, the fables of Marie get careful consideration in the light of modern literary and historical scholarship.  I am excited to use this fine resource on my next trip through Marie.  The introduction to Marie's place in fable history (35) is particularly strong.

"Great Selection of Simple and Interesting Fables for All Ages."  The first thing a reader might notice here is that the back cover and introduction are littered with grammatical errors like "I am sure that all of you will enjoyed the book" and "full of great little fables that will brings and give all you awesome information."  Wow!  The beginning T of C has as its last listing "Free Page," referring apparently to the blank last page.  36 fables receive a page each.  The first fable misspells the word "its" three times.  Except for the recurrent spelling errors, the versions of the fables are good, brief, and pointed!

Print-upon-demand has reached a new level with this book.  Not only does it not list Townsend as the author on the cover, but it does not even list a publisher!  And it is not exactly print-upon-demand, because it was printed three days before I bought it on Amazon.  Amazon tells me on their website that the publisher is "CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform" or something like that.  I am surprised to see Townsend resurface.  About three or four fables to a page, with a T of C at the beginning.  No illustrations inside the book.  The illustration of "The Ant and the Dove" on the cover is nicely done, with an expressive face on the hunter shooting his gun while the ant bites his leg.  Rabbits, frogs, and a diminutive stag look on.  I am unsure what makes this book either first or big.  Our alert cataloguer, Jeanette Hilton, noticed that both the interior content and the publisher are identical in this book and "Aesop's Fables," published in the same year. What is different in the two books? The cover image, the title, and the place of the publisher.

This is an enlargement, perhaps with emendations, of "Gobble-Up Stories," a copy of which is in the collection, written in 1966.  That collection of thirty-three fables has grown here to forty-six, and the collection of fables forms the first of three parts of this present book covering the first eighty-five pages.  Oscar Mandel is a Belgian-born American writer in French and English.  His foreword here shows a healthy respect for fable and La Fontaine -- and for his own particular contribution to the genre.  The great news about thiis book -- and the 1966 shorter edition -- is that these stories really are fables.  They are brief, witty, and apt.  Mandel may allow himself a bit of a comment a la La Fontaine, but it will be an insightful comment.  As Mandel himself points out in the foreword, several of the stories here are based on traditional fables, but Mandel takes the story in his own direction.  I have read the first ten and thoroughly enjoyed them.  I will be happy to read more, and I would not say that of every book in this collection!  In Mandel's reworking of the Chanticleer story, "The Cock Who Made the Sun Rise" (12), Chanticleer misses a day but explains -- "logically" of course -- that he probably did such a good job the day before that it counted for two days.  The fisherman catches a minnow (13) and is about to throw it back when the minnow objects that it is not being taken seriously.  Of course, the convinced fisherman takes the minnow along for his supper.  MSA on 19 again takes the story into a new direction -- and a delightful one.  The fox eats the cheese and declares it a vile Gorgondola that would have hurt the crow's great voice.  So both go away happy!   There is a T of C on 6-7, which includes "La Fontaine's Apology" (34).  Who could pass that up?

As the back cover declares, this book is for children two to six years old.  It has two fables with step by step illustrations in bright colors.  The two fables are LM and TH.  The booklet looks as though it may be computer generated.  Mistakes include, e.g., the lack of a capitalized first word of the sentence on 7.  A second example is the lack of a capital on "hare" in the title of the second fable while "Tortoise" is capitalized.  Unfair to hares!  Though the final page of TH has the traditional moral, its sentence is "All the animals praised slow & steady tortoise."  There is no motivation for the lion's letting the mouse go.  This book was printed one week before I ordered it.  Amazon has no further booklets in the series to offer.

This is a fascinating book of some 52 fables, either one or two pages per fable.  The French and English, both in rhyming couplets, face each other on left and right pages, respectively.  The fables are both clever and accessible.  The poet is apparently famous for children's literature, and the book fits that view.  Any good fable also talks to adults.  People wanting to find a charming example of both the art and the wit here should read "La Taupe et la Vache/The Mole and the Cow" on 26-27.  Many animals here wear shoes.

Here is Dover's reprint of the 1925 original.  The hardbound 6" x 9" Volland volume has become an 8¼" x 11" paperbound Dover volume.  Pagination has been added and the cover picture is not extended from the front through the back.  The back cover here is rather textual description of the book.  The typesetting of the text on the front cover has also changed.  The final page has the same illustration but now has only "The End" rather than a description of the Volland ideal.  I find the illustrations in this book still as indistinct as I have in so many copies of the original!  Otherwise let me quote what I say about the original.  This book uses the illustrations of the Volland 1918 Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks (see my listing for 191August, '24?) and puts them now with prose stories rather than the verse used there.  Most fables also get new titles.  In addition, the order is changed, so that now the ass from MSA is holding a (miswritten Latin?) "farewell" sign four fables before the book ends!  Though some illustrations come out clear, I am still disappointed at how frequently the Volland illustrations end up lacking definition.  The end-paper illustration here is dramatically clear!

This is a substantial illustrated anthology, offering some 303 large (7¾" x 10¼") pages of texts from over thirty Russian fabulists.  There is a T of C at the end.  The approach is chronological, from Trefiyakovsky on Page 5, born in 1703, to Markovsky, born in 1893.  An anomaly for this reader is that the title starts rather with Kheraskov, born in 1733, whose segment does not occur until Page 74.  Those represented with the most texts include Sumarokov, Khemnitser, and Krilov.  The illustrations seem drawn from a number of sources, perhaps not recognized here beyond indications of collections published at various times, as indicated on the colophon page at the end of the book.  I recognize frequent borrowings from Doré and Billinghurst.  There are several charming colored illustrations from a Russian artist in and around 1911.  On the padded front cover is a charming rendition of "The Monkey and the Spectacles."  This is an impressive volume!

Here is a highly simple paperback booklet of 32 pages.  The first image is an impressive full-page image of WC facing the T of C which indicates that there are nine fables here; that image is repeated with the fable on 23.  There is on 9 a good image of the boy in BW running and losing his hat as the wolf attacks the sheep.  GA gets this moral: "Being lazy seems like fun, but hard work brings rewards" (19).  New to me is "The Fat Hens and the Thin Hens" (20).  The fat hens laugh at the thin hens and call them great names: "Thinnie Winnie," "Lean Lizzie," "Scraggy Aggie," and "Skinny Banana Toes."  When the cook needs to prepare a special dinner, the surviving skinny hens have the last laugh.  Amazon seems to indicate that there was a first edition in 2013.

This is a sturdy, small (4¾" x 6¼"), and handsome 69 page edition that uses Rackham's art well.  Several of the strong illustrations are allowed to move outside the margins, like WS (8), WC (13); FC (19), and FK (22).  The cover illustration of the cat as a house-calling doctor is nicely enhanced with blue coloring for his coat.  This black-and-white illustration occurs again on 45.  TMCM's conversation between the two mice makes for good endpapers.

This book was first copyrighted in 1949 by Virginia Lee Demetrios.  The copyright was renewed in 1972 by George Demetrios.  This emperor spends all his time and all his money to be well dressed.  He has a different suit for every hour of the day.  The detailed art, heavy in curlicues and with a trace of Raoul Dufy, is delightful, for example the two views of the palace and city facing each other a few pages into the book.  There is a great deal going on in each illustration.  Two robbers claiming to be weavers say that clothes woven from their magic cloth could not be seen by anyone unfit for the office he holds or very stupid.  Is it logical for the emperor to think that, if he wears a suit from this cloth, he can tell who is wise and who is foolish?  The people of the city are anxious to learn how wise or stupid their neighbors are.  The emperor sends an honest old minister because he is surely fit for his job.  In the meantime, the weavers are putting all the costly thread and silk into their knapsacks.  The detailed images of the city reappear near the end as the whole town talks about the splendid cloth.  The emperor knights the two weavers and gives them the title of "Gentlemen Weavers."  Burton cleverly uses a mirror or chair to cloak the emperor's nakedness from the viewer.  Finally, in the procession, we get to see the emperor fully naked except for his sword and belt.  "'But the Emperor has nothing on at all!!!' said a little child."  Soon all the people cry out together that he has on nothing at all.  The emperor feels silly and knows that the people are right.  "The procession has started and it must go on now!"  Does he learn anything?  Do they catch the robbers?  This is perhaps the longest and most detailed version of the story that I know.

This book was first copyrighted in 1949 by Virginia Lee Demetrios.  The copyright was renewed in 1977 by George Demetrios.  I have a hardbound copy of the same book, but its copyright was renewed by the same George Demetrios in 1972.  Strange.  This version removes the subtitle: "A Folk Tale Classic."  As I wrote there, this emperor spends all his time and all his money to be well dressed.  He has a different suit for every hour of the day.  The detailed art, heavy in curlicues and with a trace of Raoul Dufy, is delightful, for example the two views of the palace and city facing each other a few pages into the book.  There is a great deal going on in each illustration.  Two robbers claiming to be weavers say that clothes woven from their magic cloth could not be seen by anyone unfit for the office he holds or very stupid.  Is it logical for the emperor to think that, if he wears a suit from this cloth, he can tell who is wise and who is foolish?  The people of the city are anxious to learn how wise or stupid their neighbors are.  The emperor sends an honest old minister because he is surely fit for his job.  In the meantime, the weavers are putting all the costly thread and silk into their knapsacks.  The detailed images of the city reappear near the end as the whole town talks about the splendid cloth.  The emperor knights the two weavers and gives them the title of "Gentlemen Weavers."  Burton cleverly uses a mirror or chair to cloak the emperor's nakedness from the viewer.  Finally, in the procession, we get to see the emperor fully naked except for his sword and belt.  "'But the Emperor has nothing on at all!!!' said a little child."  Soon all the people cry out together that he has on nothing at all.  The emperor feels silly and knows that the people are right.  "The procession has started and it must go on now!"  Does he learn anything?  Do they catch the robbers?  This is perhaps the longest and most detailed version of the story that I know.

This emperor is so clothes-conscious that he has matching outfits made for his dog.  He declares a special annual clothes-showing day, and nothing pleases him as he prepares for it.  "Find me new tailors."  A minister overhears two men praising their tailoring skills.  Their clothes are made from a rare and wonderful cloth, and only they know how to weave it.  When a minister checks on them, he sees nothing.  "Our cloth is very fine and delicate.  Only a fool cannot see this beautiful cloth."  They give the minister a sample of the cloth, and he takes it to the emperor.  The minister repeats the key line to the emperor.  "Give the tailors more money and tell them to work more quickly."  On the big day, as the emperor admires himself in the mirror, his dog covers his eyes with his paws.  All bow as he exits.  "No one noticed that he wasn't wearing any clothes!"  (Is that right?)  When the waiting crowds see the naked emperor on his horse, they begin to whisper to each other.  When a little boy and his sister giggle "The emperor has no clothes on," everyone knows it is true.  This image may be the best in the book.  The horse looks in wonder.  The dog still has his paws over his eyes.  The tailors sneak away with their sacks of gold.  Filled with shame, the emperor makes his way back to the palace to get dressed.  "I have been very foolish."  He promises never to be so vain about clothes again.  And he is happier from that day on.  Except for the lack of noticing by the palace people, I find this a well told version of the tale.

As I wrote of an earlier reprinting, there was a spate of reprintings of Detmold's "The Fables of Aesop" about the time that the copyright on his 1909 edition ran out.  Our collection includes copies from the original publisher Hodder and Stoughton in 1981 and from Crown Publishers (1985), View Productions (1985), and Gramercy Books (1994).  This present unabridged reprinting may be the finest of these recent efforts.  My hat is off to Dover for publishing such a fine book – and for venturing into "fine" publishing after their success with well-made books for low prices.  The frontispiece of TMCM is present.  There is a list of the 25 illustrations just after the opening T of C.   I am warming to these illustrations, though it remains true that they do not attempt to capture the narrative.  They are fine in their own right.  The smaller black-and-white illustrations are also worth noticing, starting with the dramatic image on 1 of the mouse facing an engaged lion.  The illustrations are on the same high grade of paper as the text pages, but they have no printing on their verso.  The helpful man in Acadian pointed this out to me, and at first I passed on it.  As I finished, I took another look and was impressed and decided to take along at least one book treasure from New Orleans.  FS is pasted onto the cover and faces 120.  I think Detmold's work is more engaging the more it moves into richer browns and reds.

This is a large-format book, about 12" x 11".  The crow is pictured on the cover over the fox with something in his beak.  Like the book itself, the art is big.  The first image is a double-page image showing crows gathering on wires at dusk.  But a wafting scent gives our crow pause.  A bakery distinguishes itself in the lower foreground beneath the wires.  With only one word to announce it, the second pair of images shows the theft and the "Thief!"  The next two pages have just one statement: "Bread is best eaten by twilight."  This is a creative approach to this standard tale.  The next pair of pages introduces the fox and his "eyes glittering dangerously from the dark edges of the woods."  The next pair of pages disorients us by changing the viewpoint by 90 degrees.  Make the book into a long portrait -- page over page -- and we can look down from treetop on the crow and the wily fox beneath.  "She always sneaks."  In the next pair of pages, "Their eyes meet, a challenge is spoken."  Fox sings, and crow must sing back.  "From mouth to mouth -- a song and a piece of bread."  The last image has crow flying away: "A new day breaks.  An old hunger aches."  This book is an example of how to tell an old fable in a fresh way.  Well done!

Here is a second booklet based not on the Aesopic story of FG but rather on the Qoheleth midrash about a fox entering a vineyard, like the Aesopic story of the weasel and the granary.  (The other booklet is "The Fox and the Sourgrapes" from Hillel Press, perhaps in 1981).  This second version offers vivid and highly stylized colored illustrations.  This fox wears a small round hat and blue trousers and carries a calico suitcase as he dreams of food.  He spies a rich vineyard and seeks out a narrow hole at the bottom of the fence.  In the meantime other animals go about their business, whether as mother or as repairman.  The fox weighs himself, apparently in an effort to slim down and so enter the vineyard through the hole.  He succeeds, even leaving his hat on a folding chair outside the vineyard.  He enjoys the grapes but then finds himself too big to get out through the hole.  And so he has to spend nights in the vineyard until he is again slim enough to emerge.  In the end he marches off with his suitcase.  For the Qoheleth midrash, the story illustrates how we come into the world naked and need to be ready to go out that way too.  As the back cover suggests, somehow Keren Grinspoon Israel is involved in this book.

The back cover provides this summary: "The Friendship Fables is a heart-warming magical tale about the unlikely friendships of a mouse, Jalla, a lion, Komar, an antelope, Namoan, and a lamb, BaaRam.  In their search for apeaceful existence, they embark on a mystical journey to far off lands, and face many challenges and dnagers along the way.  Through these tests of their courage, strength, and compassion, they ultimately find something even greater."  I read the first two chapters of the first of four cycles and found them in strong touch with both the Aesopic fable of LM and the cycle of Panchatantra stories about four friends.  The story is told in rhyming verse.  I wonder how much Sarah Anne Fecteau knew that she was imitating the Panchatantra.  8½" x 11".  Printed on demand by CreateSpace.

In this version, the hungry mouse is trying to get at berries by leaping off of the lion.  Tickling wakes the lion, who says he knows what it is like to be hungry.  He helps the mouse to get the juiciest berry.  The mouse promises to repay, and that brings the lion's laugh.  The special approach of this edition is signaled on the cover: " Peek-Through Windows on Every Page!"  This promise is kept.  Every page is either cut to be less than a full page or has holes in it, to allow seeing the page underneath.  The approach is cleverly and exactingly executed.  Almost 10½" square.

I read the first two of the 28 numbered short offerings in this print-upon-demand book.  They are explicitly Christian and, I would say, overtly pious.  A sparrow hears Jesus say that sparrows are sold two for a penny, and the sparrow flies off to town to learn how that much is.  After disappointing learning that he is not worth much monetarily, the sparrow overhears the rest of Jesus' statement repeated by the generous widow as she puts in her two cents.  The dewdrop struggles with similar questions of identity but happens to splash onto the rose just before the king decides to pick that rose for his bride.  There are several black-and-white illustrations along the way.

The book offers in paperback form the 2010 hardbound book from the same publisher.  I will include comments I made there.  About 2003, Toni and Slade Morrison did three books of fables for Scribner's, all beginning with the question "Who's Got Game?"  Their artist in all three of those was Pascal LeMaitre.  Now here is a new offering with a different artist and publisher.  Jimi Hare cannot help himself.  He is fast!  He is known as a show-off and travels alone.  Jamey Tortoise cannot help himself in a different way: he is smarter than everyone else.  He studies alone.  The newspaper announces a contest, a race whose winner gets a golden crown.  Jimi and Jamey both sign up.  Jamey calls the newspaper and asks which story interests the paper more: the winner who loses or the loser who wins.  The fox reporter loves both stories and says so.  Jimi asks the reporter what gets more attention: the largest crowd and or the loudest cheers.  The answer is the same.  When the race starts, Jamey takes off fast and Jimi goes straight to the bus stop.  During the day he travels on bus, train, boat, and plane.  Jimi entertains the crowd all day with stunts.  Jimi came in first, Jamey second.  (There seem to be only these two contestants.)  Since the reporter knew the story of the tortoise and hare, she had expected the opposite.  So her headline was "Winner loses!  Loser wins!"  Jimi says he won because he has the crown.  Jamey says he won because he has the headline.  The last page shows them shaking hands and declares "It's not the race.  It's not who wins.  It's when the runners become good friends."  This is a lively and engaging presentation, if a bit far-fetched.

Here is a later version of a booklet already included in the collection as part of the "Magic Wagon" series of "Short Tales" published in 2010.  This later version acknowledges a 2008 copyright by Abdo Consulting Group.  The front cover, title-page, and colophon-page have changed, but interiorly these 32-page TMCM booklets seem identical.  The mice's clothing on the cover suggests the difference between country and town life.  Further, the town mouse is brown, and the country mouse gray.  In the country, the two sit on thimbles and eat off the top of an overturned Earl Grey tea box.  A portion of that illustration is here used also as the cover image. What is left on the table in town are remnants of dessert.  In rush two dogs.  Once in the clear, the country mouse is on his way.  "Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes in fear."  The announced moral is "Better a little in safety, than much surrounded by danger."

This book is a cousin of the 2009 book "Usborne Animal Stories for Little Children."  It contains one story from there.  This book is smaller in format, 8" x 8" rather than 10" x 10".   Where that book had two fables among its five stories,  this book has nine traditional Aesopic fables.  As there, so here the stories have a leisurely quality that allow for full narrative development.  FC is told as effectively as I have seen, with suitable illustrations.  In TH, Harry Hare had forgotten breakfast on race day, and so he got hungry along the way.  Do not miss 44-45, where Tom Tortoise's friends have all the gear for tracking him and helping out.  GA ends happily with Ant inviting Grasshopper in out of the cold and Grasshopper promising that next summer he will work.  In DS Dog growls at the dog in the water before he gets more desperate for the "bigger" bone and barks.  Frank Endersby illustrates LM here, as there.  In LM, a little tail brushed the tip of the lion's nose.  He sneezed and awoke.  Endersby's best illustration is that of the laughing lion on 110.  In FS, we learn early that Fox is a trickster as we see him douse Stork from a trick bouquet of flowers.  FS takes two pages to detail Stork's repeated attempts to eat Fox's soup from the wide, flat dish.  The story ends ambivalently as Fox promises not to play more tricks "…until next time!"  "The Tortoise and the Eagle" ends surprisingly.  Tortoise gets dizzy and queasy in the sky and asks to be taken back down, and Eagle does just that, delivering him safely and cautioning him "Be a tortoise and be happy."  The book's last two fables are WS and TMCM.  The variety of artistic approaches enriches this book.  The short life of Aesop at the end of the book says that he used his tales "to help people understand each other."

Here, as promised, are forty one-page black-and-white cartoon presentations of Aesopic fables in five, six, or seven panels each.  This little book acknowledges as its source Chambry's Greek and French translation.  There is a T of C at the beginning and an AI at the end.  The fables are numbered.  Thil handles the fables well for the space limitations of his medium.  GA advertises plural ants and advises foresight (13).  "The Tortoise and the Eagle" is handled well: the eagle's pique is nicely motivated and quickly expressed (14).  TH is cleverly motivated when the hare says "C'est moi le plus rapide!" and the tortoise asks in response "Et si c'était moi?" (15).  Thil as artist does a good job, e.g., with the fat chicken on 18.  As text-writer, he has a gift for pithy morals, as in the story of the ass who goes through several masters: "Les nouveaux ma?tres font souvent regretter les anciens!" (24).  Google has not yet heard of Stella Junior.  Print on demand is growing.  Here is a French book produced in the USA the day it was ordered.

Here, to my surprise, is a new edition of this book that seems identical with the original 2012 edition by  the same publisher.  As I wrote there, there are ten groups of twenty fables each, with individual fables generally using two pages.  The resulting heavy 512-page book has a lot to recommend it.  What a large group of fables to present!  What lively colors and illustrations, starting from the bright orange tiger on the front cover.  The groupings are: "Funny Fates"; "Great and Small"; "Deadly Sins"; "Challenge and Chance"; "Schemes and Dreams"; "Mad Mistakes"; "Feathers and Fools"; "Heroes and Villains"; "The Key to Happiness"; and "Narrow Escapes and Sticky Endings."  The beginning T of C is divided to give a page to the fables in each grouping.  A two-page title-page then introduces each grouping.  The thick, slippery pages contain little characters around the edges in patterns that are uniform within each grouping.  About every fourth fable is illustrated.  OF does not have the usual explosion.  Instead "all the breath whooshed out of him and he flew up and away, zipping around like a balloon!" (26).  The illustration cleverly follows suit with the text.  The moral to "Hercules and the Wagoneer" is "Fate helps those who help themselves" (37).  The illustrations are generally simple and lively.  Among the better illustrations are "The Boy and the Filberts" (148); FC (276); "The Cat and the Mice" (237); DS (267); BW (264-5 and again 282-3, mirror opposites); and "The Donkey and the Wolf" (407).  "The Cat Maiden" is told in a form new to me.  Venus and Zeus argue, the latter that things could change their habits and instincts.  Venus argues that such change is impossible.  Zeus makes the transformation and at the wedding feast Venus conjures up a mouse, and the bride tries to pounce on it (189). An overall favorite of mine here is "The Eagle and the Kite" (332-34).  It is well told, well illustrated, and well moralized.

This miniature dollhouse book is one-twelfth of the original's size and is thus about 7/8" x 1".  It uses the cover of Don Daily's "The Classic Treasury of Aesop's Fables" but, as the eBay advertisement says, what is inside is rather "some generic child-related printed interior pages."  The back cover, however, reproduces Daily's.  The typeface on the cover is just small enough that, even with the help of a magnifying glass, I had to hunt up the original not by Daily's name but by the picture on the cover.  The first page looks like a T of C but is not the T of C from Daily's book.  Aesop spreads out into more and more places!