1950 A Book of Children's Literature. Selected and edited by Lillian Hollowell. Third edition. NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. See 1939/50/66.

1950 Achtzig Fabeln. Federzeichnungen von George Walter Roessner. Paperbound. Cologne: Blaue Bändchen #161: Hermann Schaffstein Verlag. DM 20 from Kunstantiquariat Joachim Lührs, Fleetinsel, Hamburg, May, '94.

This booklet seems to me typical of and instructive for post-war Western Germany. "Genehmigt für den Gebrauch in Schulen durch Control Commission for Germany" stands on the verso of the title-page here. This 72-page booklet has plain brown paper wraps featuring a proud tuxedoed frog on the cover. It is not easy to get eighty fables into seventy-two small pages! The ending T of C gives a good historical overview of the German fable, starting from Steinhöwel and concluding with Kleukens. A random sampling of the subjects treated does not bring up any surprises in most of the fables. The most recent are the most novel in subject, concluding with the booklet's last fable, "Der Gummiball." The rubber ball wanted to get away and to get higher than he had yet gone. He got away over the hedge. He rolled into the ditch next to the road, and is lying there still. The printing is sometimes uneven here. The print used for both the T of C and the recognition of sources is very small! This book once belonged to Volkschule BÖBS.

1950 Aesop's Fables. Retold, Illustrated with Woodcuts, and Printed by Elfriede Abbe. Woodcuts printed directly from the original blocks. Text printed from hand-set type. #311 of 500 copies, signed. Ithaca, NY. $131.50 from Greg Williams, Dec., '95.

The woodcuts are strong, even if the art is not in the style that I would favor. 122 fables. There are 43 illustrations of varying size and configuration, including some that spread across the center page-division (2-3) and others that are split above and below text (18 and 24). The best illustrations are GGE (6), "The Old Woman and the Wine-Jug" (7), "The Geese and the Cranes" (11), FM (15), and "The Kid and the Wolf" (38). There is a nice statement "No More of Aesop's Fables" after the last fable on 70. The printer seems to have had troubles getting the numbers aligned in the T of C (71). I first saw this book in the library of Holy Names College twenty years earlier. I am delighted at last to have found a copy!

1950 Aesop's Fables. Preface (and translation?) by Gordon Home. With Eight Page Illustrations in Colour by Charles Folkard. Hardbound. London: Adam & Charles Black. See 1912/50.

1950 Aisopeia.  Bruno H. Vandenberghe, O.P.  Illustrations from the Ulm Aesop.  Paperbound.  Printed in Brussels.  Brussels: Uitgeverij Electa.  $11.49 from Librairie Rita De Maere, Namur, Belgium, through ABE, June, '03.  

The bulk of this book is a set of 150 Aesopic fables done into Dutch verse.  The fables are divided into these subsets: stories from mythology, animals (alone or with people), humans (alone or with gods), nature, and anecdotes.  I am surprised that they do not seem tied to the Greek or Latin editions or their numbering systems.  The fables are adorned by sixteen small Steinhoewel illustrations; Steinhoewel's figure of Aesop is on the cover.  The illustrations are well reproduced.  Before the fables there is an 88-page introduction covering, e.g., the definition, types, and history of fables.  After the fables, there are a bibliography, a T of C, a list of illustrations, and an AI.  I am surprised that I had not known of this book earlier.

1950 Better Homes and Gardens Story Book. Favorite stories and poems from children's literature, with illustrations from famous editions. Selected by Betty O'Connor. Dust jacket. Des Moines: Meredith Publishing Co. $4 at Biermaier's, July, '94. Extra copy for $3, Summer, '89.

LM, GA, and BC, with illustrations for the first two and text for all three from the The Aesop for Children (Rand McNally, 1919). Otherwise a lovely book in good condition. There are selections from Lear, Milne, Stevenson, Caldecott, Rossetti, Kipling, Potter, et al.

1950 Bouyant Billions, Farfetched Fables, & Shakes Versus Shav. By Bernard Shaw. Hardbound. London: Constable and Company. $23.35 from The Internet Bookshop UK Limited, Nov., '02. 

"Farfetched Fables" forms the center of three works brought together here. It was first published in 1948. It begins with a long political and ideological preface (63-99). Six fables follow. The first is a discussion of nuclear war. A young woman gives an aggressive and entrepreneurial young man an idea in the midst of discussion and then deserts him because he wants to profit from it, even though it may destroy the human race. The second fable features political and military British leaders talking about poison gas and their respective mistakes in dealing with it. In the third, futuristic categorizers of people encounter a "nincompoop who thinks he's a genius and a genius who thinks that he is a nincompoop" (43). A scientist in the fourth dictates a chapter on living on air and water. The fifth is a futuristic discussion on how to generate the perfect human being, including how to release him from the body. The last is an advanced class discussion on what causes a new thought. Might a new thought be a visitation from dead spirits?

1950 Bravo Tortue. Images de Romain Simon. récit de R. Simon et P. François. (c)1950 Ernest Flammarion. Albums du Père Castor. France: Flammarion. $7.95 at Cliff's Books in Pasadena, Feb., '97.

The delightful story of Pousette and Vif.. Much is added: the names, a provocation, character descriptions, fans on both sides, a description of the night before, the goal, and some activities along the way. For a direct copy, see The Hare and the tortoise by Golden Press in 1950/66. Cliff's main claim to fame seems to be that it is open until midnight.

1950 Children's Stories. Selected by the Child Study Association of America. Illustrated by Theresa Kalab. Racine: Whitman. $8 at Claudette's in Brookdale Lodge, CA, Aug., '89.

A vintage 50's big book on cheap paper. The selections are generally good. Three fables: SW, LM, and "Androclus and the Lion."

1950 Dix Fables de la Fontaine. #14508. Paperbound. Printed in Switzerland. Doxa. $27 from Alibris, Nov., '00. Extra copy numbered #3463 for €20 from Antiquariat Richart Kulbach, Heidelberg, August, '07.

Apparently an anniversary memento from a Swiss firm that makes watches. The outside and inside cover proclaim "1889-1949." The approach to the ten fables is whimsical. The illustrations are all light hearted and brightly colored. My prizes go to WL (11) and Le Héron (25). The tortoise carries an enshrined hourglass on his multi-colored back (23). The moral to each fable says something about Doxa. Thus for TH it is "Rien ne sert de courir, il faut partir á temps--et pour partir á temps, avoir une Doxa"! There is an appendix, titled "Als Schlussfolgerung," in German. It gives a three-page history of the Doxa firm and climaxes in the claim "Pünktlichkeit ist Edelheit" (Punctuality is nobility). Stiff paper wraps, folded over to form a pocket in the back cover.

1950 Fables de la Fontaine. Illustrations de Guy Sabran. Hardbound. Paris: Éditions G. P. $4.99 from Fox Meadow Farm Sales, Mckenzie, TN, through eBay, Oct., '08.

I have two later booklets depicting La Fontaine's fables by Sabran, both in "La Bibliothèque Rouge et Bleue" from this same publisher. I like Sabran's work! Here there is some overlap in the twelve fables illustrated in his work of the same title from 1960. The booklets are of the same size: 10½" x 7¾". This booklet has 28 pages, as against the 36 there. This booklet offers one to four lively, colorful, expressive illustrations for each of its twelve fables: GA, "Le Héron," TH, BF, "Le Coche et la Mouche," "Le Lion et le Moucheron," FG, WL, FS, FC, LM, and GGE. Some illustrations are duochrome and some polychrome. Among my favorites here are the title-page illustration of GA; the heron as fisherman (5, also on the cover); the trumpeting mosquito (16); and the greedy collector of golden eggs (28). Keeping vigilant on eBay pays off in a lovely booklet like this one!

1950 Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks Adapted from the French of La Fontaine. Combined with Reynard the Fox and other fables from France. Retold by W.T. Larned. Pictured by John Rae. NY: Wise Book Co. See 1918/50.

1950 Fables: Jean de la Fontaine. Illustrations de Jacques Ferrand. Hardbound. Printed in France. Tours: Maison Mame. $7.50 at In and Out of Print Books, San Francisco, June, '89.

Twelve excellent colored illustrations (somewhat in the tradition of Hellé) on separate pages; the best are FC (I), WC (IV), and FG (V). Also nice black-and-white drawings, e.g., of the lion and the mosquito (21). The end papers contain lovely drawings distinct from those in the text. Ferrand is not mentioned in Hobbs.

1950 Fables: Jean de la Fontaine. Illustrations de Jacques Ferrand. Dust jacket. Hardbound. Printed in France. Tours: Mame. $10.73 from Tim Waller, Greenville, SC, through Ebay, Feb., '03.

I wrote extensively on this book already, only now to find a copy of it with a dust jacket, indeed, a dust jacket sewn onto the book. Since there is no way to see the cover here and no dust jacket there, I will keep both books in the collection under separate numbers. The dust jacket has a large and lively illustration of the two mice enjoying wine and dessert at the city meal. The back cover shows frogs using lily pods as parasols. See my comments on the copy without dust jacket.

1950 Fables: Jean de la Fontaine ("Fox and Crow" cover). Illustrations de Jacques Ferrand. Hardbound. Printed in France. Tours: Mame. $26 from Erik Charter, Cambridge, Iowa, through Ebay, Oct., '00.

There is a small chapter in publishing history hidden in this book. Interiorly it is almost identical with the copy of this book that I had found during June, 1989 at "In and Out of Print Books" in San Francisco. See my comments there on the book. It is noteworthy for the twelve beautiful full-page colored Ferrand illustrations, listed on 123. I will here list the differences that this copy shows from that copy. That copy had a green back-cover, black spine, and fully colored front-cover with a lively design including a fox, a figure with a mask, a rooster with a book, and a small figure riding the rooster. This copy has the same cream-colored material throughout the cover and spine. FC is pictured on a 4¾" x 5¼" plate pasted onto the front-cover. That copy had green end-papers with a two-page panorama of fable figures. This copy has blank end-papers. There the pre-title-page had "Fables" near its center. Here the pre-title-page has "Fables" at its top; it is preceded by a page with "1 FABLES" and "ALBUM D" near its bottom. The "Tout droits" and copyright statements facing the title-page are differently typeset, as is all of the information on the title-page itself. There the title-page had at its bottom "Tours/Maison Mame/Agence á Paris 6, Rue Madame, VIe." Here it has simply "MAME." This copy lacks the foxing of that copy. Might its paper also be of different quality? After 126, following "Imprimé en France" that copy had "1390-1950" at the start of its printing statement. This copy has instead "1677-1952." I hope that information someday helps some bibliographers or historians! I can find no evidence that either of the copies belongs to the numbered sets announced at the books' beginnings.

1950 Fables - 1950. J.S. Lawson. Dust jacket. NY: Exposition Press. $2.40 at Lord Randall, Marshfield, MA, April, '89.

A strange collection of thirty-three original, contemporary fables. Very few are about animals. The best are "Two Mice" and "Pidgin." Others to note include "Mr. Prete," "Jonquil," and "Chartin." The tales tend to be violent, heavy-handed, and sardonic.

1950 Favorite Folktales and Fables for Boys and Girls. By Joanna Strong. With illustrations by Hubert Whatley. Hardbound. NY: Happy Hour Books: Hart Publishing Company. $6.51 from Harold Jones, Petersburgh, NY, through eBay, Feb., '04. 

Fifteen Aesopic fables are mixed in here with various folktales. There is a good black-and-white-and-green illustration of a broken bridge and the fallen donkey (53); other illustrations are of LM (61) and WC (64). Also included in the fifteen is what is identified as an old Hebrew fable: "The Wise Bird and the Hunter," with an illustration (72). There is a T of C at the front. I suspect that this book's fable materials are virtually identical with those in Hart's publication of a year later, A Treasury of the World's Great Myths and Legends for Boys and Girls. This edition may add color that is lacking there.

1950 First Fairy Tales. Retold by Mildred L. Kerr and Frances Ross. Illustrated by Mary Sherwood Jones and Ray Evans, Jr. Columbus: Charles E. Merrill Co. See 1946/50.

1950 Fun Krylows Meszolim (Basnie). Paperbound. Warsaw: Idisz Buch, przy CKZwP. $35 from Henry Hollander, Bookseller, San Francisco, Nov., '02. Extra copy for $20 from the same source, May, '01. 

Here is a book that one would not easily find in circulation! Paperbound books from Warsaw in 1950 might not have had a long life expectancy! This book contains some 120 of Krylov's 200 fables on 224 pages, followed by a T of C. There is an assortment of illustrations, not very well printed; many are modeled after well-known illustrations of Krylov's work. Since they may be difficult to find, I will list the illustrations here: FC (21), WL (35), "The Wolf in the Kennel" (55), "The Cat and the Pike" (66), "Geese" (95), "Quartet" (105), "Trishkin's Kaftan" (113), "The Bear and the Hermit" (116), "Demianov's Fish Soup" (127), "The Wolf and the Shepherds" (151), "The Industrious Bear" (172), "Pig under the Oak" (175), "The Officers (?)" (194), and "The Cock and the Cuckoo" (207).

1950 I. A. Krilov: His Representation in Russian Folk Illustration. (Russian). Vladimir Bouch-Bruyevich. Essay by S. Klepikov. Limited edition of 1000. Canvas-bound. Printed in Moscow. Moscow: State Literary Museum. $8 from Thomas Noe, South Bend, IN, through Ebay, Sept., '01.

This is a wonderful treasure. It is a canvas-bound book of some eighty pages with a wealth of black-and-white photoreproductions of illustrations of Krilov's work. A foreword includes several illustrations of fables from Russian books--or more likely manuscripts--before Krilov's time: FS, "Death and the Woodcutter," and FG. Then comes an extensive bibliography, apparently of thirty-one individual fables and their illustrations. The dates here for the illustrations seem to range from 1856 to 1902; the fables themselves are dated chronologically from 1806 to 1830. Those dates fit with all that I have learned from Quinnam, Stepanov, and Ralston. There follow in the next chapter thirty-six pages of photoreproductions. As far as I can tell, these are a selection of the items listed in the preceding chapter. Thus the first illustration here, FC on 37, relates to the one listing under Item II on 14 in the bibliography chapter. Other illustrations that I can recognize present "The Old Man and Three Youths," "The Box," "Death and the Woodman," "Elephant and Pug," "The Rich Man and the Cobbler," "The Cat and the Cook," "The Soup of Master John," "The Swan, the Pike, and the Crab," "The Pig and the Oak," "The Three Townies," and two great collections (frontispiece and 72). "The Pig and the Oak" on 69 seems to satirize the Germans in 1914. After these photoreproductions, there follow an AI of fables, an AI of proper names, a list of illustrations, and a T of C.

1950 Jumbo book of favorite stories. 90 tales, stories, rhymes. No author or illustrator acknowledged. Chicago: Wilcox & Follett Co. $6 at Red Bridge, Kansas City, May, '93.

An oversized book on cheap paper with some very nice colored illustrations. These vary from section to section of the book, from black-and-white through monochrome and duotone to five-color images. Five fables occur in a black-and-white section, from 133-40. Now, here is a surprise: these very five texts and their illustrations occur on the same pages of (More than 30 of) American Childhood's Best Books (1942) from the American Crayon Company. ("The Fox and the Little Red Hen" and "As I Was Going to St. Ives" are interspersed in both cases. The images for the former are changed here.) Otherwise what we have here is a nice collection of kids' material of all sorts. Some crayoning on the title page.

1950 La Fontaine Vingt Fables. Illustrées de lithgraphie originales et d'ornaments par Jean Lurçat. Portfolio. Printed in Switzerland. Lausanne: André Gonin. $1,350 from Gemini Fine Books & Arts, Hinsdale, IL, by mail, August, '99.

Bodemann 467.1. Bassy #56. Mentioned (30) by Hobbs. One of the stars of this collection! For each fable, there is a large lithograph on the third (or right-inside) page of a four-page folio made by folding a large sheet once; the back of the lithograph-page is always blank. (The exception to this rule comes in the frontispiece, OF, which is on the fourth page of its folio and thus faces the title-page, first in its folio.) There is a slip-sheet for each lithograph. The fable text precedes (and if necessary follows) the illustration. Bodemann's succinct criticism is helpful: "Grossflächige Gestaltung, kräftige Farbakzente, surrealistische Inhalte. Fabelthemen z.T. drastisch verfremdet. Reduktion der Fabelhandlung auf einige plakative interpretationsbedürftige Symbole." The illustrations typically add two or three colors to black and white. Bassy lists the twenty subjects. There are some wild creations here! For me the wildest are "L'Astrologue qui se laisse tomber dans un Puits" (23); "Le Lion abattu par l'Homme" (27); and FG (39). In this last illustration the vine grows directly out of a mountain-top. The best of the illustrations for me are: "L'Oiseau blessé d'une Flèche" (19); "Le Rat et le Huitre" (55); "Le Cerf malade" (59); "Le Soleil et les Grenouilles" (75); and TT (79). There are also ornamental black-and-white vignettes after eight of the fable texts. There is a T of C at the beginning. The copy is signed by Gonin and Lurçat and numbered #150 of 250 (+25).

1950 Mythoi Tou Aisopou. Helenes Konstantopoulou. Illustrated by Eirenes Tzougkrou. Modern Greek, with English vocabulary. NY: D.C. Divry. $1 at Vassar Book Sale, DC, May, '92.

See my comments on the 1950/70 edition. By contrast with it, this thinner book lacks the Greek-English vocabulary at the end. This title page shows several curious differences. This edition does not add a parenthetical "Aesop's Fables" to the title. It speaks of being for the second and third grades of schools in America, where the later edition will speak of those in the diaspora. Once one arrives at the T of C on 3, the books are the same, though this edition shows page numbers four digits lower for each story. The binding identifies this as the "new second edition," whereas the later book is listed simply as "second edition." That I have trouble explaining!

1950 Picture Story. 8 little stories. No author or illustrator acknowledged. Chicago: Merrill Company. $10 at Blake, June, '93.

A large-format pamphlet picking up on many of the stories contained in Merrill's Tuck-in Tales (1946). One of the repeaters is the last of the eight stories here, "Tommy Turtle," a faithful version of Kalila & Dimna's TT story. Students of book history will be interested to compare the job that this book's editor has done on the text in Tuck-in Tales. The story may be half as long! The illustration is the same, but has been cropped on both sides and has lost its extension down around the text. Tommy wears a big hat with a feather and says "Yoo hoo" unprovoked when he sees some children below.

1950 Story Time of My Book House. Edited by Olive Beaupré Miller. Volume 2 of twelve volumes. Chicago: The Book House for Children. See 1937/50/54.

1950 Storytime Tales. A Treasury of 67 Favorite Stories, Poems, and Songs, Old and New. Pictures by Corinne Malvern. A Big Golden Book. NY: Simon and Schuster. $14 at Your Choice Antiques, Gretna, NE, March., '93.

A pleasing large-format children's book including five fables: GGE (32), BC (82), GA (107), FG (116), and FC (150). The book is in surprisingly good condition, and its colored illustration work on thirsty paper is well controlled. A very nice find in the country! As so often, the page of acknowledgements here (2) accounts for every story in the book except the fables.

1950 Storytime Tales. A Treasury of 42 Favorite Stories, Poems, and Songs, Old and New. Pictures by Corinne Malvern. A Big Golden Book. NY: Simon and Schuster. $7.50 at The Bookery, Iowa City, April, '93.  Extra copy for $5 from the Toy and Doll Show, State Fair Grounds, West Allis, Oct., '99.

Now here is a surprise. I thought I was picking up an extra copy of this pleasing book that I first found a month ago in Gretna. It turns out to be an alternate version that stops flat at 128 where the fuller version goes on to 208. Of the fuller version's five fables, four thus survive the cut: GGE (32), BC (82), GA (107), FG (116). This copy is also in surprisingly good condition, and its colored illustration work on thirsty paper is well controlled.

1950 The Fables of Aesop. Selected, told anew and their history traced by Joseph Jacobs. Illustrated by Kurt Wiese. Dust jacket. NY: MacMillan. $6 from Dan Behnke, Chicago, Sept., '90. Extra copy of the 1962 eighth printing for $12 from Gloria Timmel, July, '87.

A handy volume in great shape. There are two aquatints per story in the familiar Jacobs version: some show good wit, like the tree/stake for "Young Thief and Mother" on 87. There is a slightly different version and picture for "Venus and the Cat" on 151. Do not miss "The Laborer and the Nightingale" and "The Ass' Brains."

1950 The Fables of Esope: from Jane Grabhorn's typographic laboratory in San Francisco. Text from William Caxton. Illustrations from the Antwerp 1486 edition by Gerard Leeu. Brochure. San Francisco: Grabhorn Press. $16 from Serendipity Books, Berkeley, CA, June, '01.

This is an eight-page brochure presenting four fables, each with an illustration. The texts come from Caxton in 1483. The illustrations "are from the Latin edition of Aesop printed by Gerard Leeu at Antwerp in 1486" (i.e., Bodemann, #11.1). These woodcuts are clearly in the Steinhöwel tradition. Was this brochure a trial or prospectus for a projected but never accomplished work of the Grabhorn Press? Or perhaps just a little project of Jane Grabhorn's? Serendipity's helpful people seemed to suggest the latter.

1950/54 Wolf in CHEF'S Clothing. The picture cook and drink book for men. Robert H. Loeb, Jr. Illustrated by Jim Newhall. Dust jacket. Fifth Printing. Chicago: Wilcox & Follett Company. Gift of Linda Schlafer from Alkahest, Evanston, Sept., '91. Extra copy of, apparently, the first printing with a stained cover and no dust jacket for $5 from an antiques mall in Hannibal, Oct., '94.

This book has almost no redeeming Aesopic value except for the delightful title and the nice picture facing the title page: the wolf-chef puts on an apron while a sheep's skin hangs on the coat-rack. Quick and easy picture-recipes for the man who has never cooked. Typical of the 50's and very sexist.

1950/58 The NEW Wolf in CHEF'S Clothing. The picture cook and drink book for men. Robert H. Loeb, Jr. Illustrated by Jim Newhall. Dust jacket. Chicago: Follett Publishing Company. Gift of Linda Schlafer from P.R. Schwan at DePaul Book Fair, March, '93.

See my comments on Wolf in CHEF'S Clothing (1950/54). This revision reduces page size and changes some of the colors. Outdoor cooking and drinks get more attention now. Oatmeal, farina, pancakes, and casserole chien chaud (franks and beans) are dropped. A revolution of rising expectations? The same great picture is there facing the title page. A great find!

1950/64 Selected Works of La Fontaine. Edited by Philip A. Wadsworth. No illustrations. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Arcturus Books paperback: 1964. $1 at Biermaier's, Minneapolis, July, '89.

A college textbook for Americans with a representative sampling of LaFontaine in several genres. About forty fables are included, with helpful brief notes under the texts and a short glossary of unusual words at the back. There are good short introductions to each section. Here is a book worth consulting when I look at any fable LaFontaine has done.

1950/66 Better Homes and Gardens Story Book. Favorite stories and poems for children with original illustrations from famous editions. Selected and edited by Betty O'Connor. Ninth Printing: 1966. NY/Des Moines: Meredith Press. $2.25 at Universal Video (!) in Seaside, OR, Aug., '87.

There are fascinating changes in this later printing. The paper is shinier. A poem from Belloc is added on dedicating a gift to a child (hint!). The pieces dropped are: "Ten Little Indians," "Little Black Sambo," "Meeting the Easter Bunny," and "All Through the Night." One can observe some social history by comparing the two printings.

1950/66 The Hare and the Tortoise. A Père Castor Book. By R. Simon and P. François. Illustrated by Romain Simon. Translated by Constance Hirsch. (c)1950 by Flammarion. NY: Golden Press. $4.95 at Children's BookAdoption Agency, Kensington, MD, Sept., '91. Extra copy for $1 at Pageturners in Omaha, Jan., '89.

The delightful story of Prudence and Flash. Much is added: the names, a provocation, character descriptions, fans on both sides, a description of the night before, the goal, and some activities along the way. Apparently a direct copy of Bravo Tortue, published by Flammarion in France and listed here under 1950.

1950/70 Mythoi Tou Aisopou (Aesop's Fables). Helenes Konstantopoulou. Illustrated by Eirenes Tzougkrou. Modern Greek, with English vocabulary. NY: D.C. Divry. $4.50 at Cardijn, '86. Extra copy for $4 from Dundee, Nov., '92.

The Greek makes for fun reading, and the verse morals are cute, but I am afraid there is not much here more than evidence that Greeks still relish the stories (and that they are good for teaching!). The illustrations are quite simple. T of C with indications of illustrations. Now you can also use a workbook together with this reader: Biblion Askeseon (1976) by Helen Kardamakis Dorizas.

1950? A Book of Fables. Adapted from Aesop by Sheila Hawkins. Harlequin Books: edited and produced by Noel Carrington. London: Royle Publications. £10 at Ballantyne & Date, London, July, '92. Extra copy for £1.80 at Ripping Yarns, London, May, '97.

A sideways pamphlet of fifteen fables alternating black-and-white and colored pairs of pages. Some fascinating and different details: A boy scout chides the son for riding the donkey. The old man tips the donkey into a duck pond and goes home without it. The happy donkey has a good splash and trots away to the fields. The cow swallows the frog by accident. The hedgehog's arrival forces the fox to declare the grapes sour. New to me: "The Cowardly Pig." The best illustration is of the proud bull frog. The good copy has some crayoning on the cover and some painting inside; the extra copy has some creases in its first and last pages.

1950? A Froggy Fable. Paperbound. London: Juvenile Productions, Ltd #1713. $8.00 from Franklin Haus, Candor, NY, Dec., '02. 

This 12-page pamphlet combines four lovely full-page colored illustrations with two identical colored covers and six pages of text with black-and-white illustrations. The definition of "fable" may be stretched in the telling of this tale. A lonely cobbler frog accepts a pair of worn shoes from an old frog and repairs them as requested, but the wearer never returns to pick them up. So the cobbler frog wears them and not only has some luck, but he also makes contact with people. I enjoy the colored pictures especially, like the final picture of the frog cobbler with his new friend on the way to "rambling" together.

1950? Aesop's Fables. Based on the texts of L'Estrange and Croxall. Paperback. Printed in USA. NY: Giant Junior Classics: Books, Inc. $5 from Bollix Books, Peoria, IL, through Ebay, June, '00. Extra copy in slightly poorer condition for $5.50 from Elizabeth East, Joplin, MO, through Ebay, May, '00.

This book is nearly identical with the hardbound "The Fables of Aesop" which I have listed under "1925?" After the title-page, they are done from the very same plates. Test for example the chip off of the "9" on 79. The series changes from "The World's Popular Classics" there to "Giant Junior Classics" here. See my comments there. This cover depicts a camel dancing in the midst of the animals. The good copy is in very good condition. This must among the early paperback editions! As has happened so often, I had not known of this book's existence for years, and then I found two copies in very short order.

1950? Aesop's Fables. No author, illustrator, or publisher acknowledged. Pamphlet. $5.00 from Pam Craig, Watertown, NY, through Ebay, May, '99. Extra copy from an unknown source at an unknown time.

I do not remember when I have had to fill in so many "not acknowledged" answers about a book! This is a 4 x 3.5" pamphlet with a total of twelve pages. Perhaps its most interesting feature is the variety of spacing and even fonts that the printer used on the various fables. Included are TH, TMCM, WL, "The Fox and the Lion" (for which the moral is "Familiarity breeds contempt"), "The Cat and the Mice" (with perhaps the smallest print I have ever seen in a book), and "The Fox in The Well." The hare deliberately naps. The moral for TMCM is unusual: "Rich people often have more care and trouble than poor people." In "The Cat and the Mice" the cat hoped "that the mice would mistake her for a bag, or for a dead cat at the least…." The story features the line, "Many a bag have I seen in my time, but never one with a cat's head" and the moral "Old birds are not to be caught with chaff." The wolf sighs and walks away from the fox in the well, and the fox dies. The moral here--not enclosed in quotation marks as the others are--is "An ounce of help is worth a pound of pity."

1950? Aesop's Fables for Young People. Illustrated in line by R.F. White. And with five colour plates by Gil Dyer. No editor acknowledged. Foulsham's Boy and Girl Fiction Library. London: W. Foulsham & Co., Ltd. $4.75 from Abbey Antiquarian Books, June, '98.  Extra copy with missing first blank page a gift of Bonnie Schuman from Pageturners, Jan., '95.

The text is identical with that in Foulsham's 1945? edition with the same title. See my comments there. This edition adds five colored illustrations, several of which occur rarely: "Aesop plays with the Children" (frontispiece), "The Boy and the Thief" (33), and "The Porcupine and the Serpents" (96). I find "The Fox and the Mask" illustration (48) particularly successful. The story of "The Boy and the Thief" (22) misses the ironic turn found elsewhere. The boy is at first perplexed: how will he defend himself against the approaching thief? Then the idea occurs to him to outfox the fox.... This edition adds lists of the two kinds of illustrations. There is some internal foxing. And someone put a staple or a fork through the front cover and the first twenty pages!

1950? Aesop's Fables: The Wolf and the Dog. From William Caxton's Translation of the French. Edna Johnson. Illustrations by Anyon Cook. Pamphlet. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. £1 ($1.80) from Abbey Antiquarian Books, Winchcombe, July, '98.

A simple sixteen-page pamphlet with spined paper wraps. The telling of the fable is straightforward and very effective. The illustrations, colored and black-and-white, are simple and serve the story well. Might there be others in a series with this booklet?

1950? Children's Favourite Stories in Pictures. No author or illustrator acknowledged. Sydney: Consolidated Press Ltd. $2.70 somewhere in Colorado, March, '94.

This large-format book is unusual in a number of respects. First, it is one of the very few books I have from Australia. Second, it includes an unusually broad range of material, from Greek myths to Australian aboriginal folklore. Aesop is given two three-page sections: 23-25 and 87-89. Three fables are presented on each page with text and illustration equal in size and alternating columns with each other. On 89, the fables switch finally to color. The illustrations of the second set (87-89) seem to me superior in their artistry; they remind one of Boris Artzybasheff.

1950? Children's Stories. No author, illustrator, or publisher acknowledged. $1.50 at Renaissance Airport, Jan., '90.

The ultimate in cheap books! TH is the last story, with a nice one-colored picture of the hare sleeping in his overalls. Aesop shows up when people put together a simple book for kids. The title on the page tops is Favorite Story Book.

1950? Choix de Fables de la Fontaine 1. Présenté par Béatrice Mallet. Paperbound. Editions Chagor. $19.99 from Jennifer Carden through eBay, Dec., '02. 

This is a memorable squarish book, just over 8" and just less than 8" wide. Mallet's work is unique, and that quality makes the book memorable. In its 24 pages, six fables are illustrated, with GA, OF, and LM all receiving one illustration; OR receiving two; "Le Lion et le Moucheron" receiving three; and "Le Savetier and le Financier" receiving four. The illustrations are full-page and in color. Both covers also present full-page colored illustrations. Maybe the best of all these is the back cover's meeting at the doorway of cicada and ant. Of course I notice that there are three other members of the series that this booklet belongs to!

1950? Choix de Fables de la Fontaine 2. Présenté par Béatrice Mallet. Paperbound. Liége, Belgium: Editions Chagor. €38.50 from Abraxas-Libris, Bécherel, France, March, '09.

This second booklet in the series of four is another memorable squarish book, just over 8" and just less than 8" wide. Mallet's work is unique, and that quality makes the book memorable. In its 24 pages, five fables are illustrated: MM (3 illustrations); FM (3 illustrations); FS (2 illustrations); "Le Coach and the Fly" (2 illustrations); and "The Fox and the Goat" (2 illustrations). The back cover is a bonus illustration of the milkmaid dreaming of cows and pigs. The cover seems to be a melange of fables, including some beyond this book's contents. The illustrations are again full-page and in color. Maybe the best of all these are the climactic scene of FS (15) and the last scene of "The Fox and the Goat" (23). Is the fox thumbing his nose at the goat as he walks away and leaves him stranded? The frog here seems to have the rat caught with a fishing pole's line, not with a line tied to the legs of both characters.

1950? Choix de Fables de la Fontaine 3. Présenté par Béatrice Mallet. Paperbound. Liége, Belgium: Editions Chagor. €38.50 from Abraxas-Libris, Bécherel, France, March, '09.

This third booklet in the series of four is another memorable squarish book, just over 8" and just less than 8" wide. Mallet's work is unique, and that quality makes the book memorable. In its 24 pages, seven fables are illustrated: WL (2 illustrations); "Acorn and Pumpkin" (3 illustrations); DS (1 illustration); DW (3 illustrations); TB (1 illustration); FG (1 illustration); and CJ (1 illustration). The first and last views in DW balance each other beautifully to show the turning of tables in this fable. The back cover is a fine bonus illustration of the fox at the top of a ladder salivating and smelling the grapes which he cannot reach. The cover has the wolf confronting a crying lamb. The illustrations are again full-page and in color.

1950? Choix de Fables de la Fontaine 4. Présenté par Béatrice Mallet. Paperbound. Liége, Belgium: Editions Chagor. €38.50 from Abraxas-Libris, Bécherel, France, March, '09.

This fourth booklet in the series of four is another memorable squarish book, just over 8" and just less than 8" wide. Mallet's work is unique, and that quality makes the book memorable. In its 24 pages, six fables are illustrated: TH (3 illustrations plus the front cover); FC (1 illustration plus the back cover); "Le Laboreur et ses Enfants" (2 illustrations); TMCM (2 illustrations); TT (3 illustrations); and GGE (1 illustration). The illustrations are again full-page and in color. The front cover's illustration may be the best defined. The two illustrations for TMCM work very well together: the welcome to the city meal and the quick escape from the meal.

1950? Damals Sprachen die Tiere. Fabeln aus Bidpai, dem Buch der Weisheit, mit Holzschnitten aus dem Mittelalter. Für Kinder herausgegeben von Johanna Zimmermann. Munich: Parabel Verlag. $21.50 from David Morrison, Portland, July, '93.

A splendid find! Colored (fifteen) and black-and-white (fourteen) woodcuts alternate as the text works through twelve major fables. I think the colored woodcuts are wonderful! One of the twelve, "The Monkey and the Turtle" (10), includes another fable, "The Lion, the Fox, and the Ass." Two of the twelve each include two others: "The Hostility of the Animals" (30) includes both "The Bird, the Rabbit, and the Cat" and "The Snake and the Frog," while "The Crow and the Snake" (56) includes "The Bird and the Crab" and "The Bird, the Fish, the Dog, and the Snake." Different: other turtles call out to the flying turtle (28), and a clever bird tells the crab of the "danger" to the fish, and the crab relays the message to the fish themselves (58). Why should the deer be wounded in the woodcut on 51 for the story "The Friendship of the Animals" (42)? T of C on 5. Buch der Weisheit is from Lienhart Hollen in Ulm in 1483, according to the "Nachwort" on 64.

1950? Damals Sprachen die Tiere. Johanna Zimmermann. Illustrations taken from Buch der Weisheit. Hardbound. Berlin: Der Kinderbuchverlag. DM 29 from Berlin?, 08/01.

Here is the East German version of a book I had found earlier from Parabel Verlag in Munich. I will repeat what I wrote there. A splendid find! Colored (fifteen) and black-and-white (fourteen) woodcuts alternate as the text works through twelve major fables. I think the colored woodcuts are wonderful! One of the twelve, "The Monkey and the Turtle" (10), includes another fable, "The Lion, the Fox, and the Ass." Two of the twelve each include two others: "The Hostility of the Animals" (30) includes both "The Bird, the Rabbit, and the Cat" and "The Snake and the Frog," while "The Crow and the Snake" (56) includes "The Bird and the Crab" and "The Bird, the Fish, the Dog, and the Snake." Different: other turtles call out to the flying turtle (28), and a clever bird tells the crab of the "danger" to the fish, and the crab relays the message to the fish themselves (58). Why should the deer be wounded in the woodcut on 51 for the story "The Friendship of the Animals" (42)? T of C on 5. Buch der Weisheit is from Lienhart Hollen in Ulm in 1483, according to the "Nachwort" on 64.

1950? Deutsche Fabeln aus dem 16. und 18. Jahrhundert von Luther und Lessing. Bearbeitet und Herausgegeben von Dr. Jakob Szliska. Mit Bildern von Max Teschemacher. Hardbound. Kaiserslautern, Germany: Alfo Kunstdruck Verlag. DM 35 from Versand Antiquariat, Wörthsee, Germany, August, '00. 

Here is one of three books in uniform format from Alfo. The other two are Fabeln von La Fontaine and Fabeln nach Äsop. All have a canvas binding, colored paper covers with a colored illustration at the center, and 32 pages. Here a T of C at the beginning announces fourteen fables. Each fable has a two-page spread. On the left page is a fable from either Luther or Lessing, with a separate, highlighted moral at the end. For Lessing, this highlighted moral is a part of the fable itself. On the right is a frame of black-and-white designs above and below a colored illustration of the fable. The frames here play with the story in the manner of Rabier, as they do in the La Fontaine volume. I cannot understand the application under FM (7); is one man being invited in two different directions? For LS (8), Luther uses the proverb "Don't eat cherries with your masters; they throw the pits at you." The drawing underneath the picture shows the bringer of cherries being dismissed by the lord who eats them. I only now become aware of Lessing's development of the fable of the dying lion. The horse refuses to take revenge on an enemy that can no longer hurt him (12). I am also delighted with Lessing's development of the fable of the robbed miser. It is not just that he is poorer, but that someone else is that much richer (24)! The image for this fable is particularly well done.

1950? Douze Fables de la Fontaine (Cover: Fables de la Fontaine). Choisies et racontée aux petits par Berthe Renard. Large pamphlet-format. Printed in Nuremberg. Paris: Collection du Jeune Age No. 1: Editions Etranco. $39.50 from Lee Stoltzfus, Lititz, PA, through Ebay, Sept., '99.

I am tempted to date this book ten years earlier because of the French-German connection of a French publisher printing books in Germany. The cover presents an engaging image of smiling animals grouped around King Lion. Every other page is a strong colored illustration with a line or two of moral. This is one of very few prose editions of La Fontaine's fables that I have seen. Among the best illustrations are those showing the plaid sox of the fox in FC (7). WL (9) sets the contrast well between the big hunter with pistol and knife in his belt and the skirted lamb with a bouquet in her hands. The tuxedo in fine jacket and vest in FG (21) only stands and looks up. The book was originally sold by Joseph Gibert on the Boulevard St. Michel. A high price for a pamphlet book, but the illustrations make it worth it. They are lovely and well preserved.

1950? Einhundert Fabeln: Von der Antike bus zur Gegenwart. Bearbeitet von Karl Wilhelm Künz. Pamphlet. Hamburg: Hamburger Leseheft #118: Hamburger Lesehefte Verlag. DM 8,50 from Antiquariat Richart Kulbach, Heidelberg, July, '01.

This 72-page pamphlet is a jewel. It focusses very well on presenting one hundred fable texts for classroom study. Pages 68-69 give a bit of information about each fabulist, and 70-72 offer a very brief overview of fable. Other than the beginning T of C, this booklet then is all fables. They are very well chosen! They come from around the world but especially from Germany. I enjoyed trying five new fables. Poggio's #36 tells of a man who wanted to get out of the custom that, when one slaughters a pig in winter, he holds a feast for the whole town. He goes to an old man and asks him how to do it. The man answers "Just claim tomorrow morning that your pig has been stolen." That night the old man steals the fellow's pig. The next morning, the robbed man comes to the old man and tells him that he has been robbed. The old man congratulates him on making the claim well. The more urgently the fellow tries to tell the truth, the more the old fellow congratulates him on lying well. Greed and lying punish themselves. Lessing's #58 asks what one should say to poets whose texts seem to fly way over the heads of most of their readers. Perhaps we should say what the nightingale once said to the lark: "Do you fly so high in order not to be heard?" Seidel's #77 presents the toad who looks at a mole hill and says proudly "My, how huge the great wide world is!" Etzel's #83 presents a gnat who is about to bite a stag when the stag takes off in a hurry. The gnat, proud to be so feared, pursues the stag but does not notice the lion behind him pursuing the stag too. When the stag finally is caught in the branches of the forest and the lion pounces on him, the gnat tells the lion that he has the gnat to thank for this booty. The lion does not even glance at him. "The mighty know no gratefulness" the gnat says, and promises never again to hunt a stag. In Kafka's #85, a mouse has run into walls and then complains about the walls coming together in a corner where there is a trap. "Just change the direction in which you run" says a cat and eats her. Do not miss the seventeen versions of GA in #100.

1950? Fabeln nach Äsop. Bearbeitet und Herausgegeben von Dr. Jakob Szliska. Mit Bildern von Max Teschemacher. Hardbound. Kaiserslautern, Germany: Alfo Kunstdruck Verlag. DM 35 from Versand Antiquariat, Wörthsee, Germany, August, '00. 

Here is one of three books in uniform format from Alfo. The other two are Fabeln von La Fontaine and Deutsche Fabeln aus dem 16. und 18. Jahrhundert. All have a canvas binding, colored paper covers with a colored illustration at the center, and 32 pages. Here a T of C at the beginning announces fourteen fables. Each fable has a two-page spread. On the left page is a prose fable after Aesop, with a separate, highlighted moral at the end. On the right is a frame of black-and-white designs above and below a colored illustration of the fable. The frames here play less than they do in "Fabeln von La Fontaine," but they are still engaging and delightful. Often they present "before or after" material, as on 19, where an eagle carries off a lamb above and children play with a crow below. This page also presents an excellent coordination of the black-and-white mountain tops with their lower sections in the colored picture. The colored pictures here may be more engaging than those in the La Fontaine volume. The distressed owner being "charmed" by the ass on 5 is well depicted. The illustration for "The Lion and the Man" here shows a drastic result. The lion invited the man to an open place to show him the answer to the tombstone depicting a man overcoming a lion. What we see is the lion standing over a dead and bloody man (13). The full complement of three pictures is well done for the "Chanticleer" story on 17.

1950? Fabeln von La Fontaine. Mit Bildern von Max Teschemacher. Hardbound. Kaiserslautern, Germany: Alfo Kunstdruck Verlag. DM 20 from Christoph Eger, Geisenheim, Germany, through eBay, September, '00. 

Here is one of three books in uniform format from Alfo. The other two are Fabeln nach Äsop and Deutsche Fabeln aus dem 16. und 18. Jahrhundert. All have a canvas binding, colored paper covers with a colored illustration at the center, and 32 pages. Here a T of C at the beginning announces fourteen fables. Each fable has a two-page spread. On the left page is a verse rendition of La Fontaine. On the right is a frame of black-and-white designs above and below a colored illustration of the fable. The frame material above and below is like the work of Benjamin Rabier: playful, distorted, funny. Thus for the "acorn and pumpkin" philosopher of the first fable, we find a huge pumpkin virtually burying his face. We find rain coming down on the dog forced out of his home, but no rain coming down on the bitch who dispossessed him with her brood (11). For SS, we find two beasts and their owner all streaming water down onto the ground (29). The ox laughing at the frog on 31 looks like he has been copied straight out of Rabier. The colored pictures insides the frames are good but less spirited. Perhaps the best of them shows the horse kicking the "doctor" wolf who was going to heal his hoof (21).

1950? Fables. Devised by Powell Perry. Illustrated by Robert P. Hymers. Paperbound. A Perry Colour Book: $37.70 from Polsue Books, Cornwall, UK, through ABE, June, '05.

This is a large (8½" x 7¼") pamphlet of 12 pages offering nine fables with a distinctive set of illustrations. The cover image of two mice walking along gives a good example. The images seem to work with four colors: orange black, green, and blue. Notice how they work in the title on the cover. Only TMCM gets more than a page. It is at the centerfold, in fact, and it offers several good images of the contrasting mice first pictured on the cover. I find almost no information about the background of this book.

1950? Fables choisies de Florian et d'Esope. Hardbound. $9.16 from Les Chants de Maldoror, Romedenne, Belgium, through abe, Nov., '05. 

This book is largely internally identical with another, which I have listed under "1950?" as "Fables de Florian." It was published by Vias, Protin & Vuidar in Spain. This copy has a fox and a dog on its cover, and it acknowledges both Florian and Aesop on the cover. This is a puzzling publication because it combines two books with minimal integration. That minimum lies in the cover that announces both. One opens to "Fables de Florian." After a number of pages, there is an abrupt "Fables d'Esope." Often enough here, each fable gets its own page. The titles of the fables are done in a a kind of script that seems partially italic and partially handwritten. It also has something against capital letters. Every few pages there is a full-page illustration that uses several colors. I am increasingly sure that I have seen these illustrations before. Most dramatic of the colored illustrations for Florian is the monkey hawking his circus act before the animals. The act will be with the magic lantern. One of the most pleasing illustrations is the full-page polychrome illustration of Renard preaching, with spectacles and all. The "Imprimé en Belgique" notice stands at the end of both books. The title-page for "Fables d'Esope" has a hedgehog playing something like a clarinet as he is carried on the back of a rooster. It sometimes happens in either book that an illustration will just precede its story. The book has a canvas binding.

1950? Fables Choisies de La Fontaine. Illustrations apparently by F. Zaucher. Paperbound. Chatellerault, France: Les Éditions René Touret. €7 from Librairie Bailly, Marché Dauphine, Paris, Dec., '04. 

This is a brochure of ten pages, starting from the front inside-cover and reaching to the back inside-cover. As with Zaucher's other work, Recueil de Fables de La Fontaine (1950?), there is a curious alternation of colored pages roughly in the style of Rabier and of duochrome pages using orange and black pigments. Here the cover presents a good compilation of stories, including MM, TH, OF; the whole is marred slightly by some white crayoning. Is this the same composite picture I noted in that other edition? Inside we find TH, "Le Loup devenu Berger," MM, BF, GGE, OF, and GA. The first full-color illustration goes to TH and features pictures of a seated bunny pulling petals off of a flower and of a tortoise standing expectantly with an arm around the finishing pole marked by two radishes. Further full-color illustrations include a two-page spread for MM and one page for OF. There is one last smaller image of MM on the back cover. I think I will be finding more of these heavy-paper, large-format pamphlets of La Fontaine every time I get back to Paris. A number of them seem to have been done by Touret. This one has a small mark at the lower left on the front cover: "Série 21 No. 4 G."

1950? Fables de Florian. Paperbound. Liège: Editions Bias; Protin & Vuidar, s.a. €20 from a bouquiniste along the Seine, Paris, Dec., '04. 

This is actually two 32-page books put together, each with its own pagination. The binding seems to be staples and canvas. The fables of Florian are presented in a surprising manner, in that a reader is never quite sure what is coming next; it may be a simple text, a full-page illustration, or a design. Pagination begins with the title-page, which includes a simple illustration of a rabbit and a duck. One of the first full-page illustrations, which includes several colors, occurs before its story, so that one needs to turn the page to find the story. This is "The Blind Man and the Paralytic" (13-15). Next comes a two-page illustration for "Magic Lantern," followed by its text. The first volume ends with "The Cat and the Rats," first text and then, on a new page facing the beginning of Volume II, a full-page illustration of several colors. The two-page illustration at the center of the second volume is "The Two Lions." The illustration for "The Leopard and the Squirrel" (23) is the final page (32)! If I were more excited about the fables of Florian, I might be more excited about the simple illustrations here. The best of them is perhaps the cover's scene of handing out bags of money. I presume that it fits with "Le bonhomme et le trésor" (2 in the second volume). The back cover labels this as "Editions Bias No. 4850."

1950? Fables de La Fontaine. Avec des gravures sur bois de Virgil Solis. Pandora. Leipzig: Insel-Verlag. Gift of Anthony Garnett priced at $7.50, March, '95.

Three things distinguish this collection of fables: (1) their organization into eighteen categories (and two "intermèdes") by animal groupings; (2) the eight small but lovely Solis woodcuts (6, 51, 57, 58, 73, 84, 90, 92); and (3) the publication of French language fables in Germany. There is a T of C after 97.

1950? Fables de La Fontaine. Illustrations de Béatrice Mallet. Printed in Belgium. Liège: S.I.R.E.C. £8.5 from Christine Stone, Lasarde, Bourlens, France, August, '03.

This is a large-format pamphlet of twenty-four pages. For the nine fables that are here, there are eight black-and-white illustrations and two colored illustrations. They are playful children's illustrations. Perhaps the best two are the colored illustrations for "Le Savetier et le Financier" (12-13). I recognize Mallet from the two "Keur van Fabels van La Fontaine" volumes I have listed under "1948?".

1950? Fables de la Fontaine. Paperbound. € 8.50 from Samuel Princelle, France, through eBay, Dec., '05. 

Here is a quintessentially ephemeral pamphlet! It is crumbling in my hand. Its cover pictures a donkey weeping. Does it ever become clear why he is weeping? This large-format book admits no illustrator, date, place, or publisher. Its spine is giving way, and the covers are torn. Many of the pages inside have monochrome illustrations. Some reader has added his or her own colorings at various points and with various levels of skill. One of the major glories of this collection is to snatch objects like this from destruction! On the title-page, the unsuspecting hare and weasel approach the happy cat. Every page has the same pair of border-columns displaying nine animals each. Sometimes these columns are colored in monochrome, sometimes not. The order of fables seems to be hopelessly confused here. "Les Voleurs et l'Ane" seems to be interrupted by MSA and then to continue. MSA is announced and begun only some pages later. FK suffers the same fate of being split up into pieces. It may, however, provide the most dramatic illustration, namely of the stork devouring a frog. Another strong illustration features the crow rejected by crows after he has tried to be a peacock. The final image, of the cat capturing the two litigants pictured on the title-page, is very dramatic.

1950? Fables from Aesop And Others. Translation of Sir Roger L'Estrange. Blackie's English Texts, Edited by W.H.D. Rouse. London: Blackie & Son. Gift of Jim Ciletti, Aamstar Books, Colorado Springs, May, '94.

A small book with oilcloth covers, with a green and gray pastoral illustration on the front cover. Otherwise unillustrated. The life of Aesop, which takes up the first forty pages, seems only slightly revised and expurgated. Some 155 of L'Estrange's fables are chosen; to judge from my best L'Estrange source, Gooden (1992), the fable renditions are faithful to L'Estrange, except that they do not present morals or reflections. What a wonderful little gift!

1950? Fábulas en Verso Castellano para las Escuelas de Instruccion Primaria. Por Félix María Samaniego. Cover illustration signed "Fortunato Julian." Canvas bound. Burgos: Hijos de Santiago Rodríguez. £3.50 from Quinto, London, June, '02.

This is a tidy little canvas-bound primary school book of 172 pages. A T of C at the end indicates the fables here in nine books. There are occasional designs before and after the fables. The lively cover in gold, red, blue, and green features a butterfly, snail, and rose. It at least is signed by Fortunato Julian, who may also have done the interior designs.

1950? Goldie the Goose That Laid the Golden Egg. Story by Edith Berbach. Drawings by M. Smith. Pop-up. Cincinnati: An Action Book: Artcraft Paper Products. $35 from Antique Junction Mall, Pacific Junction, IA, July, '98. Extra copies for $35 from Snowbound Books, Norridgewock, ME, at Rosslyn Book Fair, March, '92, and for $7.50, April, '96.

Mother Goose tells her goslings the story of Auntie Goldie and Farmer Brown. Though the art has him throwing away the hatchet, the written version has him killing her. A nice simple pop-up book, in the same series as The Lion and the Mouse Join the Circus (1950?). The original price was $.35.

1950? Hundert Fabeln für Kinder. Stories by W. Hey, not acknowledged. In Bildern Gezeichnet von Otto Speckter. 2.--11. Tausend. Hardbound. Braunschweig/Berlin/Hamburg: Georg Westermann. DM 24 from Bücherwurm Antiquariat, Heidelberg, August, '01. 

This is a stripped-down edition of the Hey/Speckter tradition. Hey is not mentioned. After a simple title-page, a single page lists all one hundred fables in two columns. "Rabe" then begins on 1, and "Kalb und Hund" finishes on 100. The texts seem to be the standard Hey texts throughout. The illustrations seem identical with those in the "1920?" Insel edition. Thus the crow of the first fable looks right but the image has a less extensive background than that found, e.g., in the Perthes Schul-Ausgabe under "1845?". The snowman on 3 stands up straight and is attacked by three children, but he has less of a scowl and more of a belt than the snowman in that Perthes edition. The script is Roman throughout. The book has marbled covers with a canvas binding. The paper is quite brittle. Not in Bodemann.

1950? Hundert Fabeln für Kinder. Wilhelm Hey. In Bildern Gezeichnet von Otto Speckter. 12.-67. Tausend. Paperbound. Braunschweig/Berlin/Hamburg: Georg Westermann. DM 6 from Talstrasse, Leipzig, August, '99. 

This is almost exactly a paperbound version of the hardbound, canvas-spined book I have listed under the same year by the same publisher. I find only four differences between the two books. The first difference is that between hardbound and paperback. The second lies in this edition's mention of Wilhelm Hey as author on the title-page, although he is not mentioned on the book's cover. The third difference lies in the clarity of the illustrations, which is far inferior in this edition. The illustrations here are over-inked, dark, and heavy. Might that have to do with the number of books printed? For the fourth difference lies in the notice that this printing started after eleven thousand books had been printed and went until sixty-seven thousand were printed, whereas the hardbound book is among the first eleven thousand. Let me mention at least some of my comments from that edition. After a simple title-page, a single page lists all one hundred fables in two columns. "Rabe" then begins on 1, and "Kalb und Hund" finishes on 100. The texts seem to be the standard Hey texts throughout. These illustrations seem identical with those in the "1920?" Insel edition. Thus the crow of the first fable looks right but the image has a less extensive background than that found, e.g., in the Perthes Schul-Ausgabe under "1845?". The snowman on 3 stands up straight and is attacked by three children, but he has less of a scowl and more of a belt than the snowman in that Perthes edition. The script is Roman throughout. Not in Bodemann.

1950? La Fontaine: Fables. Notes by Edmond Pilon & Fernand Dauphin. Hardbound. Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères. $5 from Miriam Barnett, Rose Valley, PA, June, '03. 

This sturdy hardbound book is about as standard as it gets. The pleasant additions here to the usual book of La Fontaine's fables include a reproduction of Chauveau's WC on the orange cloth cover and eight full-page black-and-white illustrations before the frontispiece and title-page. There are of course notes at the back, a life of La Fontaine, and an Avant-Propos. I am not sure as I write when or why I bought this book.

1950? La Fontaine: Fables Choisies, Volume I. Paperbound. Great Neck, NY: Graded Recorded Aids with Texts for More Effective Teaching and Learning: Goldsmith's Music Shop Language Department. $.49 from BargainsOutlet, Brooklyn, NY, through eBay, Oct., '06.

Here is the simplest of materials: a 21-page pamphlet, 5½" x 8½" in size, containing twenty-five of La Fontaine's fables. The pages are typewritten and apparently mimeographed or offset. The back cover advertises the other three volumes in the series of La Fontaine's fables. There are no surprises here, at least none that I can uncover.

1950? Les Fables d'Esope: Facsimile Reproductions of Steel Engravings and Hand-Cut Type from a 1659 Printing, With Translations from the Medieval French. Translated from the French by Catherine E. Cronemiller. Created, Designed and Executed by Homer H. Boelter. Original engravings by Aegidius Sadeler. Essay by Rupert Hughes. Pamphlet. Hollywood, CA: Homer H. Boelter Lithography. $20 from an unknown source, July, '98.

This volume presents fourteen two-page spreads with the same elements in each spread. Underneath distinct headers for both pages (English on the left page and French on the right), there is first on the left a short prose text with a tan-and-black initial. Each sentence end is marked by either of two small tan floral symbols. At the bottom of the left page is a moral in tan. On the right page is a large reproduction of the original engraving, with the original French version of the moral beneath it. The English moral on the left turns out to be a translation of this French moral. The fables thus presented include: BF; "The Lion and the Boar"; LS; "The Birds, the Beasts, and the Bat": "The Request for an Axe-Handle"; CJ; "The Blacksmith's Dog"; "The Horse and the Ass"; "The Phoenix"; "The Dog, the Fox, and the Hare"; FK; "The Elk and the Epileptic"; TMCM; and "The Leopard and the Hare." "The Dog, the Fox, and the Hare" is new to me. The fox, being pursued, convinces the dog that the hare will make a better meal. Also new are "The Elk and the Epileptic" and "The Leopard and the Hare." In the former, the animal refuses the man the leg he requests, since his health is the most important thing in his life. In the latter, the hare runs through the fence to escape the leopard, who promptly jumps over the fence and devours him. The moral for FK is especially good: "Ceux qui ne peuvent s'accommoder de la liberté, meritent une dure servitude." There is an opening essay "The Eternal Aesop" by Rupert Hughes. The 1659 original was done at the printing shop of Claude Cramoisy. Do not miss the pre-title-page reproduction, perhaps from the original title-page? Bodemann #59.2 comments "weitere frz. Ausgaben der Emblemfabeln Sadelers erschienen 1659 [Paris, Bibliothèque National Yb. 453] und 1743." Sadeler's original work, "Theatrum morum," appeared in 1608. The illustrations seem to rely heavily, to Sadeler's credit, on De Dene and Gheeraerts. For this fancy a product, the research and the credits are poorly done. For example, would the French of 1659 have been "medieval"? Some indication of the artist would have been called for. One can find Sadeler's own mark on the bottom of the pre-title-page.

1950? Les Fables du Sanglier. Charles Sanglier. Paperbound. Paris: Éditions d'Art du Sabot. 150 Francs from Chanut, Paris, April, '97.

Here are forty-three lively fables, each with a full-page black-and-white illustration. Most of them seemed to be based on La Fontaine's fables but then to take the cartoonist/journalist's own twisted path. Thus in FC, the old crow kills itself and drops down dead trying to live up to the fox's praise (8-9). The fox helped up a tree by the goat gets left there in a fork of the branches (16-18). The old cat is fooling the mice by claiming blindness--until a dog shows up and everybody escapes quickly (20-21). I enjoy the wit here. I cannot find a way to date this book.

1950? Les Meilleures Fables de Florian. Illustrations de R. Perrette. Paperbound. Paris: La Technique du Livre. €20 from Librairie La Poussière du Temps, Dec., '04.

I regret that it has taken me two-and-a-half years to catalogue this lovely pamphlet. Its 32 pages contain some fifteen fables. Every fable has an illustration. All but two of these are delightful polychromatics. Two near the beginning and two near the end are black-and-white. The monkey with his lantern is in many colors in a paste-down illustration on the cover. The same picture is rendered in black-and-white on the title-page. Then on the pamphlet's last page the monkey bids us farewell. His fable appears with yet another colored illustration near the middle of the pamphlet. The paper is heavy and the polychromatic illustrations have the consistency of our old "transfer" images. After the cover illustration, the illustration for "Le Crocodile et l'Esturgeon" may be the most successful. Notice the uneven paper cutting at the bottom of the text page facing this illustration.

1950? Les Meilleures Fables de Jean de La Fontaine. La Fontaine. Aquarelles de R. Perrette. Paris: La Technique du Livre. $5.50 from Brenda Dorion, Bangor, ME through Ebay, March, '00.

This large (10¾" x 7¼") pamphlet has fifteen lovely aquarelles, one of which (GA) is repeated on the cover, and two black-and-white designs--the latter for the "fin" page and for the last fable, "Le Coche et la Mouche." Fables included are FS, OF, FC, MSA, GA, "L'Ours et l'Amateur de Jardins," "L'Huitre et les Plaideurs," "Le Laboureur et ses Enfants," OR, WL, "Les Animaux Malades de la Peste," TH, "Le Petit Poisson et le Pecheur," MM, and "Le Chat, la Belette et le Petit Lapin." The bear letting go of the huge stone above the gardener may make for the best illustration. Verse texts from La Fontaine. I am grateful for Ebay; otherwise I am not sure how I would find a pretty book like this that must be rare in the United States!

1950? Little Stories from Aesop. Harry Rountree. Paperbound. Printed in Great Britain. London & Glasgow: Wm. Collins Sons & Co., Ltd. $29.76 from March House, Dorset, through EBay, Sept., '03.

This booklet presents eight fables, seven of them each illustrated by a full-color page and by one-to-several other black-and-white designs. The fables presented include BC; TH; "The Ass and the Frogs"; "The Leopard and the Fox" (unillustrated); FS; "The Fox and the Lion"; "The Eagle and the Fox"; and "The Cat and the Fox." 6¼" x 5". As far as I can tell without the other Rountree editions at hand, the illustrations here come from the Children's Press tradition rather than from the Ward and Lock tradition. To my knowledge, none of the illustrations is new. The booklet may have been published up to twenty-eight years earlier than my estimate.

1950? Little Tales from Aesop. Paperbound. Printed in Australia. London: Bairns Books Ltd. £ 4.19 from J. Groves, London, through Ebay, Nov., '03.

This is a large sixteen-page landscape-formatted pamphlet with various kinds of illustrations for its thirteen fables. The most exciting are the full-page colored illustrations for FS (front cover), DLS, "The Cat and the Birds," WS, TH, BW, "The Boastful Frog," and TH again. There is a strange monochrome illustration of GA in the second half of the pamphlet. This booklet is fragile! I had never seen it before.

1950? My First Book of Fables. Illustrated by Arthur Mansbridge. London: Collins. $3.95 at Powell's Kids, Beaverton, March, '96.

The sharpest illustration in this book is that of GGE on the title page. The others tend to lack sharpness. Ten fables, many in verse, with explicit morals marked as such. Each page is framed with a colored edge in one of three patterns with designs in either black or white. There are some unusual--and mostly disappointing--features in the versions here. In CP, can the "tiniest drop" get "up to the brink"? In GGE, the intervention comes, at the wife's insistence, after only one egg has been produced. In TH, the hare takes a nap (as in La Fontaine) before he starts the race. The illustrations for "The Bundle of Sticks" are placed in China. In FC, the crow speaks once with the cheese in his beak before he breaks forth in song and loses it; how can that happen? In TB, one illustration shows the man (carrying a lute for some reason) standing face-to-face with the bear. Another has the bear still in sight after the tree-climber has come back down, in direct contradiction to the text. Did Mansbridge read the story? Despite all of that, the pictures give the book a charm of its own.

1950? My Picture Book of Aesop's Fables. Stories Retold and Illustrated by Violet M. Williams. London: Dean & Son. $10 through Bibliofind from Avid Reader, Chapel Hill, August, '97.

Large-format children's book with identical covers of paper over boards. The characters here are universally cute and cuddly. The animals are dressed in human garb. The characters are named (e.g., Dandy and Mr. Beef in DS) and the versions longer than in most versions. TH, GA, TMCM, FS, "Billy Bat and the Battle," LM, and FG. In MSA a mouse carries the donkey's tail while father and son carry him on the pole. In "The Clever Little Fish," Johnny Jenkins, the fishing boy, actually does throw the fish back in!

1950? Neuere Deutsche Fabeln. Bearbeitet und Herausgegeben von Dr. Jakob Szliska. Mit Bildern von Elsa Schnell-Dittmann. Hardbound. Saarbrücken, Germany: Band 6: Offsetdruckerei und Verlag Klinke & Co., GMBH. €8 from Sabine Piechutta, Krefeld, Germany, through eBay, July, '07.

This book is uniform in series with several others I have but they seem to have different bibliographical data, including publisher: Alfo Kunstdruck Verlag in Kaiserslautern. From them I have Fabeln von La Fontaine, Fabeln nach Äsop, and Deutsche Fabeln aus dem 16. und 18. Jahrhundert von Luther und Lessing. This book has the same canvas binding and the same striped cover format with a picture at the center. Like them, it has 32 pages. The colors of the cover-picture here are not calibrated: blue/green stands to the right of the other colors instead of reinforcing them. The editor remains the same. The illustrator changes. The title-page declares that this is "Band 6" but I am not sure yet what series it belongs to. There is a T of C with titles but no authors at the beginning. The color work for the fourteen fables here is simple and very pleasing. Each fable's text is on the left-hand page with a colored illustration on the right-hand page and underneath it a simple sketch, often of a different phase of the fable. The best of the illustrations may be "Der Esel und die Dohle" on 7; it is the illustration that is less successful on the cover. Fabulists included here are Hagedorn, Lichtwer, Gleim, Zachariä, Wilamow, Pfeffel, Herder, Hey, Fröhlich, Ebner-Eschenbach, Busch, Seidel, and Leixner. The Busch poem included is Pater Leutenstorfer's favorite, "Der Volle Sack."

1950? Persian Fables. Retold by Jan Vladislav. Translated (from the Czech?) by George Theiner. Miniatures from the Imperial Library in Teheran selected and photographed by W. and B. Forman. Printed in Czechoslovakia. Damaged dust jacket. Designed and produced by Artia. London: Spring Books: Spring House. $7.45 at the Yesteryear Shoppe, Nampa, Idaho, March, '96. Extra copy without dust jacket for $25 at Westport Bookstore, Kansas City, May, '93.

This sideways book contains a short introductory narrative, thirty-three fables, a note on the history of the texts and illustrations, T of C, and a very short bibliography. The introductory narrative has a new king surveying personnel ask the story-teller what use he is. He responds immediately by recalling Dabzhelim's mistaken rejection of Bidpai. The typical fable-introducing scheme involves a statement "You are just like . . . in the fable" followed by the question "What fable?" The connecting narrative (in gray as opposed to the fables' black) is thin, and there are no fables within fables. Story #9 is funny and gory. Many fables here are told in different fashion from the one I have known. Thus the jackal in #3 leads King Lion to the mirroring well, and a jackal gets crushed between two charging boars in #5. #12 substitutes a jackal for the fox and a donkey for the deer in the story of "The Deer Without Brains." It substitutes a she-donkey for the "attempted embrace" explanation to bring the donkey back a second time. I am surprised to find "The Gardener and the Bear" (#15) here. #18 uses a quail and a hare for the litigants devoured by the cat-judge. #21 has one unnamed jackal, not Kalila and Dimna. The guilty jackal replaces the dead bull without punishment. #29 presents a goose who sees the moon's reflection in the water, thinks it a fish, gets frustrated trying to catch the fish, and gives up all fishing. In #30, it is a she-monkey's tail that is caught in the now wedgeless log. In #31 a jackal gets the lion hiding in his cave to answer as the cave and so to reveal his presence. "A wise man asks even the cave." Slight water-staining on lower and outer edge of the extra copy.

1950? Recueil de Fables de La Fontaine. Le Taille, F. Zaucher? Canvas-bound. Printed in Belgium. Liege: Imprimerie Gordinne? 220 Francs from Annick Tilly, Clignancourt Flea Market, Paris, August, '99. Extra copy in poorer condition for FF 150 from a Seine Bouquiniste, August, '01.

Perhaps 100 pages presenting fifty-six fables inside colored boards, with a cloth spine. Stamped in many places around the book is the name "Braley." There is no title page and no indication that there ever was one! The pagination twice goes up to "10" and then moves, with some skips, to "25," which is at least close. I enjoy particularly the full-color illustrations. The book follows a rhythm. For each of six sections there is an introductory full page of color bringing together characters from some of the fables of that section. Thus around 11 there is a picture including elements of MM, TH, OF, and "The Wolf as Shepherd." The best of these summary illustrations may be on 57. What follows each of these introductory pages is a mixture of black-and-white, two-color, and full-color pages, often following the format also found in Rabier of putting several scenes of one fable into various parts of a full-page picture. Often at the end of a section there is a final page, like the last tribute to MM just before the page marked "25." It seems as though the artist--either Le Taille or F. Zaucher (?)--stays the same within each section. A favorite individual illustration is the two-page spread on "Le Coche et la Mouche" at about 61. On 94 the illustration presents a strange conception of CW; the cat who has become a woman is chasing rats with a broom! There is a T of C on the last page, but without page numbers. The extra copy is surprising in that it frequently changes the colors of the monochrome illustrations and even of some of the texts. For that reason, I will keep it in the collection.

1950? Tales from Far and Near/Tales of Long Ago. History Stories of Other Lands. Edited by Arthur Guy Terry. No place named: printed by arrangement with Blackie and Sons. $1.35 at Twice Sold Tales, Nampa, March, '96.

This is a pair of books in one spiral-bound volume, with the second beginning after 122. Both sections have pronunciation lists at the end. The accent in the selections seems to be on what is British. At 23 in the second volume, there is a well-told version of AL with a good engraving at its beginning and an engraving of the Coliseum at its end.

1950? The Constructional Book of Selected Fables. Paperbound. $6.54 from Lesley Dunn, Maidstone, Kent, through EBay, Sept., '03.

This book is unusual in my collection in that it has no information--at least that I can find--about the publisher, place, author, or date. It is a sixteen-page stapled pamphlet with each of thirteen pages devoted to one fable; the other three pages are covers and explanation. Each story-page, about 7¼" x 9½", includes an inner section about 5" across. In this section there is a text, including an elaborate initial, and an illustration of one key moment in the fable. Alternating pairs of pages present the initial and the illustration in color. On those using color, the outer portion, about 2" across, includes two or three cut-outs to color and mount, supported by a twig, on a piece of wood. Typically these cut-outs are the two major characters in the fable. On the non-colored pairs of pages, the outside sections say "For Cutting & Painting Instructions see page 2 of cover." I presume that, for these, one can cut out, paint, and mount the larger "key moment" illustration itself. I have not seen a booklet like this before. My presumption is that its distribution was limited to Great Britain. The texts do not seem to be from any classic fable edition. In TH, the hare seems never to have awakened! The stork asked the fox a day in advance, at the fox's joking meal, if he would like mincemeat. In FG, it may have been the presence of onlookers that occasioned the "sour grapes" comment.

1950? The Lion and the Mouse Join the Circus. Willa Beall. Illustrated by Laura V. Schmeing. An Action Book. Cincinnati: Artcraft Paper Products. $25 from Yoffees, Jan., '92.  Extra copy in equally good condition for $16.50 from Shirley Korobkin, Old Orchard Beach, ME, Feb., '00.

In the same series as Goldie the Goose That Laid the Golden Egg (1950?). In slight disrepair. Another nice, simple pop-up. After the traditional story, Mister Mouse says to Lancelot: "Why don't you get away from all this?" He promises that "your might and my mind" will take them far. After they find a circus conveniently nearby, Mister Mouse pulls the circus wagon containing Lancelot. In the show, Lancelot laughs instead of roaring and blows out the flames on the rings before he jumps through.

1950? The Race of the Turtle and the Rabbit. With five 3 dimensional spring-ups. Illustrated by Laura V. Schmeing. Hardbound. Cincinnati: An Action Book: Artcraft Paper Products. $21.50 from Richard Baker, Haledon, NJ, through EBay, Dec., '03.

This book is in the same series with Goldie the Goose (1950?) and The Lion and the Mouse Join the Circus (1950?). The turtle is Myrtle, and the Bunny is Bert. Myrtle joins Mrs. Duck in telling Bert that he should not tease people so much. The latter has just claimed that she could beat Bert in a walking race; Myrtle then claims that she could also beat Bert. Sammy Squirrel suggests a race. The starting signal is Sammy's acorn hitting the ground. They all become friends again after Bert has learned his lesson in the race. The pop-ups are all one-dimensional tableaux. Excellent condition.

1950? The Tortoise and the Hare. Illustrations by Milt Groth. Oversized pamphlet. Printed in USA. Grinnell Lithographic Co., Inc. $3 from The Antique Poole, Dansville, NY, through Ebay, July, '00.

I am surprised to have won this oversized (almost 14" x 11") pamphlet at so reasonable a price. It has sixteen pages (including the covers), each with a full-page illustration--except for the central two-page spread in which the turtle sees a "Home Stretch" sign. This bunny is sure enough of himself to lie down intending to sleep. He almost catches up at the end, when the turtle slides home, stretches out his neck, and wins by a nose. The characters wear human dress throughout. The text is done in verse, one quatrain to a page.

1950? The Twelve de la Fontaine Fables as Painted in the Dining Saloon M.V. "Dalerdijk". Pamphlet. Printed in the Netherlands. Holland-America Line. $62 from Alibris, March, '00.

This pamphlet (4½" x 6½") contains a black-and-white illustration and an English text in rhyming couplets for each of twelve La Fontaine fables. They include: FC, "Death and the Woodcutter," "The two Bulls and the Frog," UP, "The Horse seeking vengeance on the Stag," GGE, MM, "The two Cocks," "The Women and the Secret," "The Two Doves," "The Acorn and the Gourd," and 2W. The last illustration may be among the best. The illustrations are done in a late art deco style, like much of post-WWII Eastern European art. All I know now of the texts is that they are from neither Wright nor Moore. The woodcutter says to death "Help me to load.  That's all I have to say/Just now: for soon I know you'll come again" (7). There may be a typo on 12, where "of" appears when "off" would make more sense. The booklet is in good condition.

1950? Werner Jaspert erzählt die Geschichte des listenreichen Reineke Fuchs. Die Bilder dazu zeichnete Cefischer. Hardbound. Frankfurt: H. Cobet Verlag. €14 from Antiquariat Stange, Heidelberg, August, '06.

The fun in this edition of Reynard starts with the cover, which portrays a "frecher Kerl" if I ever saw one! The book's first page is unusual and makes me think that the book may have been conceived as a gift, perhaps of the publishing house. It gives some history of the Reynard story and sums up the story's point: "Stärker als Dummheit und Gewalt ist der Geist." The last lines on the page give the sort of information that is usually centered and not narrated: "Diese alte Geschichte von Reineke Fuchs wird uns von Werner Jaspert neu erzählt. Cefischer malte die Bilder dazu and verlegt wird dieses Buch vom H. Cobet Verlag, Frankfurt A.M." In the sixth chapter, the queen's nonkey-maid reminds the king and queen of one of their good experiences of Reynard, which follows the plot line of an Aesopic fable. A man freed a snake upon promise that the snake would not harm him. When the snake got hungry, he turned on the man. Reynard's solution was to go back to the original scene and to get the players into their original positions. Three fables are related and two illustrated in the seventh chapter. Reynard is flattering the lion queen by telling her of the treasured gifts he supposedly sent her with Bellin, among which was a mirror with delightful illustrations. The mirror's illustrations include "The Donkey and the Dog" (illustrated on 31), "The Fox and the Cat," and WC (illustrated on 32). In the ninth chapter, Isegrim tells the "frozen tail" story to suggest to the king how evil Reynard is. He goes on to the "pulley in the well" story, wherein Reynard entices the wolf down the well to find the great cheese supposedly there. The illustrations here seem to combine black and maroon in various shades.

1951 A Treasury of the World's Great Myths and Legends for Boys and Girls. Joanna Strong and Tom B. Leonard. Illustrated by Hubert Whatley. Dust jacket. NY: Hart. $10 at George Herget in New Orleans, June, '89. Extra copy for $5 ex libris R.F. Newman from Lake Drive in Milwaukee at Constant Reader, Sept., '87. One more extra copy.

Fifteen Aesopic fables in a special section. Good black-and-white illustration of a broken bridge and the fallen donkey (169); other illustrations are of LM and WC. These illustrations are a throwback to an earlier style.

1951 Aesop's Stories for Pleasure Reading. By Edward W. Dolch, Marguerite P. Dolch, and Beulah F. Jackson. Illustrated by Marguerite Dolch. Dust jacket. Pleasure Reading Series. Champaign, IL: Garrard Publishing Company. $7.95 at Cardijn, 1985. Extra copy a gift of Creighton Classics Library, Aug., '93.

This book uses the first 1000 words a child should know. I cannot see anything outstanding about either the stories or the illustrations, which are almost red crayonings of simple black-and-whites. At best an option for a simple slide on some story for contrast with other more elaborate illustrations.

1951 Ch. H. Kleukens: Fabeln: Ein Trostbüchlein. Hardbound. Mainz: Mainzer Druck Nr. 5: Presse de Gutenberg-Museums. €23.36 from Antiquariat Querido, Düsseldorf, through abe, Oct., '02. 

This is a beautifully produced book containing some seventy fables on 65 pages. Printed in black and red on thick paper. Green boards. I learn from my favorite private collector that this is the only edition of this book. His note on it mentions that Kleukens is well-known as a type-founder; he established with his brother, Friedrich Wilhelm Kleukens, the famous Ernst-Ludwig-Presse at Darmstadt. Is the sub-title of this little book ironic? From the first few fables, I have the distinct impression that there is a great deal of irony at work here. "Monolog eines Hasen" (7) is a self-proclamation of the power to endure of the rabbit. On the next page a flame exults in the beauty of creation, part of which is that a fly in a spider's net gleams like a jewel and the burning wood screams in agony. One centimeter cries out to another that they establish every measure of greatness. A horse runs along through the fields. One of his horse-shoes makes a particularly strong sound. The hoofs exult in the liveliness of the sound. The horse knows that that hoof makes this noise only because it lacks a nail! Here is one last little treasure: "Esel" (16). The asses were having a very tough time, and decided to choose as god whoever offered the most. One day there was lightning and voice that said "I give you the thistles." The asses wanted to vote, but one old she-ass said: "Wait until he offers more." The same happened when a voice gave them thick skin. Finally a voice offered eternal life. They decided again to wait until he offered something better. The asses are still waiting and still have no god.

1951 Drei satirische Fabeln. Michail Saltykow-Schtschedrin and Valentin Katajew. Übertragen von Horst Wolf. Insel-Bücherei Nr. 382. Erste Auflage. Leipzig: Insel-Verlag. DM 14 at Dresdener Antiquariat, Dresden, July, '95.

Imagine my delight when I discovered that of the twenty-two fables by Shchedrin (as he is named there) in Fables (1941/76), the two I mentioned in my comment there are the very two translated into German here. "Die idealistische Karausche" presents a fundamental debate between two conflicting world-views, and gives a clear--and not very encouraging--resolution of their conflict. "Der erzgescheite Gründling" shows what a life without risk looks like, eventually even to the person who has refused risk. Katajew's "Die Perle" is a fascinating twist on the Gospel story of the pearl of great price. Karoline, a rare beauty, believes that she is growing a pearl under her flipper, and she gives her life to cultivating it. She passes up many opportunities because of this one source of riches until . . . .

1951 Fables by La Fontaine. Edited, with introduction and notes by R.P.L. Ledesert and D.M. Ledesert. Harrap's French Classics. London and Toronto: Harrap and Co. $1.50 from Constant Reader.

A handy 110-page schoolbook with fifty or so of LaFontaine's fables in their French and fifteen of Oudry's 1783 illustrations, alas very small here. A worthwhile book for taking along to show when there is not much space.

1951 Facetten-Reeks 1: De Fabel. Dr. J. Haantjes. 's Gravenhage: B.B. Van Goor Zonen's Uitgeversmaatschappij N.V. Gift of Gert-Jan Van Dijk, Dec., '96.

This well-preserved school-book pamphlet includes all sorts of different texts valuable for a serious academic encounter with the literary fable. Besides a verse life of Aesop, there are selections in prose and poetry from eleven different authors, only a portion of which are standard expectable fables (e.g., by La Fontaine and Lessing in the original languages). There is even one strong (Dutch?) engraving (?) of OR and the traditional Ulm woodcut of Aesop himself. I will need to wait until a quiet evening together to let Gert-Jan describe the individual works to me….

1951 Five or more Fables. Clarice and Alfred E. Hamill. Paperbound. Lake Forest, IL: Centaurs. $9.99 from Blanket Hog Trading, Eureka, CA, through eBay, August '05. 

This little paperbound booklet has nine items, each with an envoy at its end. I am presuming that Clarice and Alfred E. Hamill, who sent this as their Christmas greetings in 1951, are the authors and illustrators. These are light-hearted poems with a good punch line. The first has the lion trying to rally beasts against mankind. The bear, the crocodile, and the fox walk away from his urgings. Finally he turns to a mouse, whose only response is that he cannot because he has a little cold. In the second poem, a cormorant feeds on the fish in a wonderful pond, but whatever selection method he uses, he thins the pond and fattens himself. The result is that he cannot fly farther than a chicken and is devoured by foxes. The last envoy, after a poem on an iguana, may be among the best (22): "Now the moral from this pimply/Reptile for us all, if queasy,/Can be stated very simply:/It is only--Take it easy!" There is, by the way, a beautifully colored dressed mouse on the title-page. That is the only illustration in the booklet.

1951 Holiday Magazine. March, 1951. Vol. 9, No. 3. Including two fables by Ernest Hemingway: "The Good Lion" and "The Faithful Bull." Hemingway drawings by Adriana Ivancich. Philadelphia: The Curtis Publishing Company. $7 at a flea market in Raleigh, June, '97.

I had first found these two in a German translation in 1953: Zwei Fabeln. At this flea market, I was really looking at another book sitting on top of this magazine when I saw the small note pictured as tacked onto the fence on the cover advertising these two fables. What a find! As I wrote there, these two witty stories may stretch beyond the limits I would want to put on fable. The sophisticated winged aristocratic lion from Venice learned how primitive his fellow lions in Africa were—but had he become like them? The faithful steer was faithful to fighting and to his lady, and his faithfulness impressed the matador who killed him. The stories raise good questions. I would probably put them into the category of "parable."

1951 Michail Jevgrafovic Saltykov-Shchedrin Bajky. Michail Jevgrafovic Saltykov-Shchedrin. Illustrated by Mirko Hanak. Hardbound. Prague: Statni Nakladatelstvi Detske Knihy. $7 from Zachary Cohn, Prague, Oct., '01.

Here are eleven fables, with good black-and-white illustrations for each. I recognize many from the two English translations of Saltykov-Shchedrin's work I have. They are listed under "1941/76" and "1965?" However, the spectacular feature of this book is its three colored inserts, perhaps hand-painted. The first, presumably for "Bears in Government," has a bear up in the rafters on 48. The second, presumably for "The Idealist Crucian," shows a gathering of fish on 80. The third, presumably for "Faithful Trésor," is on 89 showing a dog and his master's chain. This copy from Zachary comes complete with a photograph, which I presume to depict Saltykov-Shchedrin, perhaps from the book's one-time dust jacket.

1951    The Aesop for Children.  With Pictures by Milo Winter.  Hardbound.  Chicago: Rand McNally.  See 1919/1951.  

1951 The Dove and the Ant: Aesop's Fables Retold. Illustrated by Sally Medworth. Pamphlet. Sydney & London: A Blue Wren Book: Angus & Robertson. AUD $31 from The Antique Bookshop and Curios, McMahons Point, Australia, through abe, May, '03. 

Various pages use pastels and black-and-white illustrations. The pastels are particularly charming. My favorite is the two-page spread on which the dove sweeps down to drop a twig for the struggling ant (12-13). This version has the second episode follow immediately on the first. The dove dozes beautifully in her tree (16-17) while the ant feels the ground tremble from approaching human steps. In all, there are 32 pages in this 4½" x 6" pamphlet.

1951 The Lion and the Mouse. By Miriam Blanton Huber, Frank Seely Salisbury, and Mabel O'Donnell. Illustrated by Mary Hoyt. Pamphlet. The Janet and John Story Books #27. Printed in England. Digswell Place, Welwyn, Herts: James Nisbet & Col. Ltd. £5 from Rose's Books, Tintern, Monmouthshire, UK, Dec., '01.

Copyright in the USA by Harper and Row 1951. This twenty-four-page pamphlet, 5¼" x 7¾", features a mouse who decides to run up on the lion's back. The simple art makes good use of the rope ends around the text as the men plot to lay the trap (7). This is the first time that I remember hearing the mouse tell the lion to stop roaring. There is a second story covering the second half of the pamphlet, "The Old Woman and the Fox." The fox, who has the job of watching the old woman's sheep, eats one each night but always has a story in the morning about who the culprit was. She cannot catch the fox, but she does throw her milk at him as he runs off. And so the tail of a fox has a white spot at its end. Are these illustrations some kind of pastel work?

1951 The Magazine Antiques, Vol. LX, No. 6, December, 1951. David Stockwell et al. Philadelphia, PA: The Magazine Antiques. $10 from Glaeve Gallery, Mt. Horeb, WI, Dec., '98.

This issue has an article "Aesop's Fables on Philadelphia Furniture" by David Stockwell on 522-25. The article begins from the Howe Highboy with a clear fable carving of FG on the lower center drawer. It relates the carving to early woodcuts in the Caxton tradition. Though the prose correctly speaks of the illustration as belonging to Caxton, the caption for Figure 3 unfortunately presents this Caxton illustration as occurring in an "eighteenth-century edition" in the Philadelphia Public Library. The article points out that three editions of Aesop's fables were printed in Philadelphia alone in 1777 and six others before the turn of the century. Engravings of Aesop's fables appear in some copies of the 1762 edition of Thomas Chippendale's Director. The article mentions and displays another highboy, a lowboy, a mantel frieze in the Powel Room, and the overmantel panel in the great room at Kenmore. It finds four fables pictured in this panel. Stockwell believes that "the unusual and delightful use of the carved fable motif in case furniture is a concept only of the Philadelphia school of craftsmen" (525).

1951 The Wind and the Sun: Aesop's Fables Retold. Illustrated by Margaret Horder. Signed by Margaret Horder. Paperbound. Sydney & London: A Blue Wren Book: Angus & Robertson. AUD $55 from The Antique Bookshop and Curios, McMahons Point, Australia, through abe, May, '03. 

In my experience, it is unusual that, as here, the sun starts the argument. The story's form is the poorer version: "Whichever one of us can make this poor traveller take off his coat shall be declared the stronger," suggests the Sun (10). Pastels and black-and-white illustrations alternate. Horder does a good job with both contestants as they do more and more and more. I like particularly the pictures of the man first dragging his coat (26) and then resting (28). Perhaps Horder's signature is what makes this book so expensive.

1951/62 Androcles and the Lion. An Old Fable Renovated by Bernard Shaw. (c)1913 George Bernard Shaw. Paperback. Baltimore: Penguin Books. $1.55 at Recycle, San Jose, Aug., '92.

I am delighted at last to have the opportunity to read the play. (The book contains some one hundred pages of stuff--mini-essays?--before the play starts, and a few pages of explanation after it.) Androcles is a Christian Greek tailor, known for his "sorcery" with animals, whom he loves dearly. He exists within a strong cast of characters including his wife Megaera, a "rather handsome pampered slattern"; Ferrovius, the fierce fighter; Lavinia, the beautiful, forthright, sometimes doubting believer; the Roman Captain; and the Emperor. As Shaw constructs it, the play becomes an examination of allegiances and motives around the question of imperialism. He writes here without apostrophes in his contractions. Was this book really sold once at Macy's for $.68?

1951/76/82 Esopo: Favole. Traduzione di Elena Ceva Valla, testo greco a fronte. With the 1491 Venetian woodcuts. Fourth edition. Milan: Rizzoli. $4.15 in Italy, Fall, '83.

A nice source. Do not miss the index of illustrations at the back. The text seems to be exactly the same as Hausrath and Perry.

1951/76/84 Esopo: Favole. Traduzione di Elena Ceva Valla, testo greco a fronte. With the 1491 Venetian woodcuts. Fifth edition. Milan: Rizzoli. Gift from Rome of Pat Donnelly, '86.

This fifth edition is identical with the fourth except for changes in the price and in the color and setup of the front and back covers.

1951? Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated. James Thurber. Dust jacket. NY: Harper and Brothers. $15 at Yesterday's Memories, Feb., '87. Extra copy without dust jacket for $4 from Second Story's Warehouse in Rockville, April, '97.

Reprint in slightly different format from Harper's original 1940 book. The printing is datable to 1950 or after, when Thurber published The Thirteen Clocks. This book is differently formatted from the Blue Ribbon editions (1943). However he is delivered, Thurber is a classic! Wonderful drawings.

1952 Aesopica. A series of texts relating to Aesop or ascribed to him or closely connected with the literary tradition that bears his name. Ben Edwin Perry. Volume One: Greek and Latin Texts. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. $45 at Black Oak Books, Berkeley, Dec., '86.

Bigger margins and thicker paper than in the Arno reprint (1952/80). Perfect condition. A real find. The standard work for textual comparison.

1952 Aesop's Fables. Illustrated by Anne Sellers Leaf. No editor acknowledged. Chicago: Rand McNally & Company. First version (#46325) for $2 at Renaissance, Summer, '89. Extra in less good condition for $1, Nov., '90, and another in better condition but with less good printing for $2.50 from Aardvark, SF, Jan., '91. Second version (#8440) for $1 at Hamburg Antique Mall, May, '94. Extra copy for $2 from Pacific Junction, Jan., '95. Third version (#1019) a gift of Mary Pat Ryan, Nov., '97. Version 3.5 is a "Tip-Top Elf Book" for $.29, like version 3, but it bears the number 8615, like version 4. It says "Edition of MCMLXI." It came from Nerman's Books, Winnipeg, Canada for $3 through Bibliofind, Oct., '98. Version 3.8 is entirely the same, except that it lacks the 1961 date on the title-page. It cost $1 at the Antiques Mall, Pacific Junction, Iowa, April, '98. Fourth version (#8615) a gift of Dee Yost, Hastings, Aug., '95. Extra copy in poor condition for $3 from Lee Temares at Baltimore Antiquarian Fair, Aug., '91.

Cuddliness is everything here. A dozen fables. I will keep at least one copy of each version in the collection. Notice the price rise from the third ($.29) to the fourth ($.59) version: over double! I may be fooled completely on the sequence of versions. I tried to work off of prices. The third version has on its title-page: "Edition of MCMLVIII." The first edition alone has a two-page spread on the opening and closing endpapers. The others present the title-page immediately after one endpaper. The four versions present an array of contrasting features, including different covers and titles: "Famous Book-Elf Books," "Famous Elf Books," "Tip-Top Elf Books," and "Elf Books." Better than the later reprints of the identical illustrations in The Rand McNally Book of Favorite Nursery Classics (1952/61).

1952 Aesop's Fables To Read and To Color. A Playtime Library Story Book. NY: Capitol Publishing Company, Inc. $2.55 from Aamstar, Colorado Springs, March, '94.

A small, almost-square pamphlet that Jim Ciletti was good enough to take from five non-fable mates. The grasshopper realizes his mistake before the ant has a chance to say anything! Fourteen fables and a last page on how to draw animals. Some small person painted and crayoned many of these animals!

1952 Aesop's Fables To Read and To Color. Irvington, NY: A Sugar Plum Story Book: Capitol Publishing Company. $20.82 from Gail Evans, New Market, VA, through Ebay, Dec., '99.

This is a 32-page pamphlet 5½" square. Its cover has a delightful full-color painting of a fox with pince-nez reading "Aesop's Fables" while other animals look on and listen. The style reminds me of Russian work being done then. Inside one finds a steady procession of two-page spreads for each fable, with text on the left and a full-page line drawing on the right. Exceptions are GA at the center of the book, which gets four pages, including a double-page illustration at the centerfold, and the last page, which offers four stages each for drawing four different animals. The best moral might be for CP: "It really works. Try it yourself sometime!" Here is another simple item that had eluded me for a long time!

1952 Animal Stories in Basic Vocabulary. By Edward W. Dolch and Marguerite P. Dolch. Illustrated by Marguerite Dolch. Hardbound. Printed in USA. Champaign, IL: Basic Vocabulary Series: Garrard. $4.50 from Stillwater Book Center, Stillwater, MN, Jan., '97. Extra copy in poorer condition for $5 from the Constant Reader, Milwaukee, '97?

This book is similar to Aesop's Stories for Pleasure Reading (1951), also by the Dolches. Almost all of the twenty stories here are fables. They include "The Camel and the Pig," "The Goat and the Wolf," "How the Rabbit Fooled the Whale and the Elephant," "The Jackal and the Camel," TT, "The Bear Says North," "The Hare and the Hedgehog," "The Duck and the Squirrel," "The Blind Men and the Elephant." "The Deer and the Lion," "The Camel and the Tent," "The Ape and the Firefly," "The Four Friends," "The Big Moose," "The Hungry Wolf," and "The Rabbit and the Monkey." After some coaching from the squirrel, Mrs. Duck now thinks that chickens fly better than she does (63); I think something went askew in this story. A deer, not a hare, tricks the lion into the well (75). The firefly gets ten apes in succession to hurt each other while trying to hurt him (83). The book uses 220 basic words and 95 of the most common nouns. That limitation contributes to the simplicity of the tellings. The illustrations, one per story, are (as in the other Dolch reader) almost crayonings of simple black-and-whites.

1952 Better Homes and Gardens Second Story Book. More favorite stories and poems from world literature, with illustrations from famous editions. Selected by Betty O'Connor. Des Moines: Meredith. $4.50 at the Lost Dauphin, Oshkosh, June, '88. Extra copy for $3.50 from Don Dupley, March, '93.

Six fables, each using Jones' version and Rackham's two-colored illustrations. This book follows up on Better Homes and Gardens Story Book (1950). I think I have seen this book in this form by a different publisher, but I do not know where.

1952 Esopo: Fabulas. Traducción Directa de Clara Campoamor. Ilustración de Victor Valdivia. First edition of 6000 copies. Hardbound. Tlacoquemecatl, Mexico: Editorial Diana, S.A.. Gift of Vera Ruotolo, August, '02.

This is a colorfully covered book of 121 pages of fables on poor and fragile paper. About every five pages there is a full-page line-drawing in black-and-white. These line-drawings are quite straightforward. The texts are short and pointed. The cover illustration is a lively rendition of DLS.

1952 Fabeln. I.A. Krilow. Nachdichtung aus dem Russischen von Martin Remané. Illustriert von sowjetischen Künstlern. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag. DEM 19,80 at J. Kitzinger Antiquariat, Munich, August, '95. Extra copy without dust-jacket for DEM 18 at Historica Antiquariat, Dresden, July, '95.

Except for the raised bust of Krylov on the cover there, this edition seems identical with that of the SWA-Verlag in 1948. See my comments there. This book has a slightly larger format, due to bigger margins; in fact, the print here is smaller than it is there, though the illustrations seem to be the same size or slightly larger.

1952 Fables. S[teve] Medvey. Printed in France. Paris: Les Petits Livres d'Or #44: Les Editions Cocorico. 25 Francs from Brancion Book Market, Paris, August, '99.

See the English-language Nursery Tales in 1952, which this small French book (6.5" x 8") reproduces. See my comments there. In "Le Chien et le Coq," the dog is presented to the fox by the rooster not as doorman but as friend--supposed by the fox to be another rooster. Do not miss the smiling tree near the end of TH. The same problem occurs here in TMCM as in the English version: the mice seem to jump from discussion behind the door to being interrupted on top of the table. Again, the cat, cook, and dogs seem to arrive together. Only "Le Loup et les Chevreaux" is not Aesopic. The colored illustrations do not rise above the average. This book has stiff boards for covers.

1952 Fables and Parables for the Mid-Century. Nym Wales. Illustrated by George Logue. Dust jacket. NY: Philosophical Library. $6 in Chicago, Sept., '92. Second copy for $6.50 at Book House in Dinkytown, March, '90.

A curious book of preachy allegories. The three poor illustrations occur on the dust-jacket cover and on both sides of the page before the title page. "The Umbrella Tree" (67-8) is untypical and good. I cannot take much of the rest. The Dinkytown version has a green cover, with upside-down printing on the spine.

1952 Fables by Aesop Minor. Osmond Beckwith. Illustrations from Harper's and other magazines circa 1850. Dust jacket. NY: The Cellar Press. $12 by mail from Thomas J. Joyce, Feb., '94.

One of the stranger text collections that I have. One text ("The Age of Confusion") mentions BC in a parenthesis at its end. Otherwise there are some creative and rather weird stories here. On my first reading I like best "Pandora's Box" and "Going to Market." The latter is quite close to an Aesopic fable. These texts raise questions, even if the question sometimes might be "What?!" The wildest of the illustrations presents a face of a locomotive coming straight at the viewer.

1952 Fables by Gilbert. By Russell Gilbert. Illustrations from paintings by Russell and Lillian Gilbert. Hardbound. Dust jacket. Printed in USA. Boston: Bruce Humphries, Inc. $15 from Zephyr Used & Rare Books, Woodland, WA, through ABE, June, '00.

This is a pleasing set of 30 rhymed fables on some 52 pages. Though they are original, they play off of traditional fable themes. Thus in the first two fables a lion makes fun of a mocking bird but promptly needs her help to remove a thorn. She then gets so proud that she does not see through the flattery of a snake. For me one of the most interesting fables gives the negative comments of parishioners against the title-character in "The Preacher Rat" (17). He resigns. Also striking is "The Family Man and the Turkey Buzzard" (19). The latter has for a defense the spewing up of rotten carrion! For something different, try "The Cobbler and the Elephant" (22). Another unusual fable is "The Bull-Dog and the Man's Family" (38). There is a last bit of fable fun in "The Rabbit and the Wolf" (49). Among many such attempts at fables, Gilbert deserves credit for creating true fables. The two illustrations (frontispiece and 6) are indifferent. Green textured boards with gilt lettering. Unfortunately, the book has the odor of being too long in a used-book store!

1952 Fables de La Fontaine. Illustrée par André Pec. Hardbound. Printed in France. Paris: Flammarion. 65 Francs from Henry Veyrier, Clignancourt, August, '99.

Now I have an original of the book I first came to know in its reproduction (see 1952/83). See my remarks there. There is some damage here to the bottom of the spine. There are also a few markings on both covers.

1952 Fables de la Fontaine. Illustrations de Guy Sabran. Hardbound. Paris: La Bibliothèque Rouge et Bleue #5: Éditions G. P. $9.99 from E. Lee Baumgarten, Martinsburg, WV, through eBay, March, '06. 

This book may be the original behind a later and shorter version done in the same page-size (10½" x 7¾") by the same publisher in 1960. That volume had only 36 pages, while this has 60. That had twelve fables, while this has twenty-two fables. A quick check suggests that all of the fables--though perhaps not all of the illustrations--of the later volume are included here. There is an AI at the end. Though the title page gives a date of 1949, the colophon page at the book's end says that it was printed in 1952 as the fifth book in the series "Bibliothèque Rouge et Bleue." This book's front cover shows a fox leaning up against a vine, thirsty for the grapes. The back cover shows a dapper crow in top-hat and scarf holding a piece of cheese. See my comments under the 1960 edition.

1952 Fables de La Fontaine. Oversize pamphlet. Printed in France. Paris: Éditions Bias. $5 from C. Soley, Barto, PA, through Ebay, Oct., '01.

Here is a sixteen-page oversize pamphlet containing eight of La Fontaine's fables with a full-page colored illustration for each. Text and illustration are matched by being on opposite sides of the same page. We thus start with a picture, then read two verse texts, then see two pictures, and so on. The eight fables are "Le Cochon, la Chevre et le Mouton," OF, "Le Renard et le Bouc," "Les Oreilles du Lievre," "Le Cheval et l'Ane," FS, GA, and "Le Loup devenu Berger." I remember the expressive illustration of "Le Cheval et l'Ane" distinctly but do not know where I saw it. OF is also a very good illustration; the frog seems off-balance with its increased size. Even the beginning illustration of the crying pig is well done, particularly for a cheap and simple children's edition. The cover shows the result of the horse's refusal to help the ass. My sense is that there were many such simple editions of La Fontaine around in France in the post-war years. Check under Gordinne and especially Liege to find more of them.

1952 Itan Aroso: Fables: Yoruba. Illustrated by Joan Kiddell-Monroe. Paperbound. London: Oxford University Press: Geoffrey Cumberlege. $15 from Peter Masi Books, Montague, MA, Sept., '04. 

This 5" x 8" pamphlet contains thirteen traditional Aesopic fables in Yoruba, each with a duochrome illustration in black and blue. The illustrations are by Joan Kiddell-Monroe who would (apparently) go on to create illustrations for a 1961 edition of Aesop's fables translated by John Warrington. She is also the illustrator for James Reeves' 1954 volume of English fables and fairy stories. The most impressive of the illustrations may be the wrap-around cover illustration. It contains many of the animals and elements of nature that will appear in the stories. This is my first Yoruba fable book.

1952 La Fontaine's Fables. Translated into English Verse by Sir Edward Marsh. Everyman's Library No. 991. Dust jacket. London: J.M. Dent & Sons/NY: E.P. Dutton & Co. $4 from The Bookshop, Chapel Hill, NC, June, '97. Extra copy without dust jacket for $4 from Just Books, May, '93.

Dent/Dutton take over the text and preface that Marsh had published through Heinemann in 1931. It is good to have his lively tellings in this compact format without illustration. I did not know that the Everyman Library included LaFontaine. Marsh apparently published his first La Fontaine fables in 1925 (Forty-Two Fables of La Fontaine). His text was also used with Marie Angel's art in 1979 (Fables de la Fontaine, Neugebauer, 1979/81).

1952 Marc Chagall: Sculpture, Ceramics, Etchings for the Fables of La Fontaine. Catalogue. November 18-December 23, 1952. NY: Curt Valentin Gallery. $10 through Bibliofind from Art Books Only, Santa Barbara, August, '97.

This pamphlet-catalogue begins with "Anecdote and Fantasy" by Chagall. After a section on Chagall's ceramics, there are three pages on The Fables of La Fontaine, including five black-and-white photographs and Marianne Moore's translation of FC. Gaston Bachelard inverts the common dictum about La Fontaine—"he tells what he has seen"—into his dictum for Chagall: He sees what people tell him or, better, what one was about to tell him. For Bachelard, Chagall surprises the dominant moment of the story. Chagall catches the cobbler Grégoire in his final supergaiety, brought by deliverance.

1952 Meshalim/Fables: Premier Volume (Yiddish). Arn Miednik. Lithographs by M. Bahelper. #392 of 500. Hardbound. Paris: Farlag de Goldene Pave. $69 from Isaac Cohen, Rishon Lezion, Israel, through eBay, Jan., '04. 

This is a lovely book. 9½" x 11". 199 pages. High quality paper. It has absolutely no markings on its covers, front or back. The twenty full-page lithographs make this book. "The Fox in the Henhouse" (14) makes skillful use of the page-color itself to depict floating feathers. Of course these white feathers against the images's predominant green stand out. They are skillful omissions of ink. A second favorite of mine (168) shows a monkey eagerly sawing off the limb of a tree on which he is sitting! There is a T of C at the back--which is of course our front. Was there, or was there to be, a second volume?

1952 Nursery Tales. Arranged by Peter Archer. Pictures by Steve Medvey. See-Saw Books. NY: Simon and Schuster. $3 at Elder's Bookstore in Nashville, April, '96. Extra copy without covers a gift of Jim Ciletti at Aamstar, Colorado Springs, March, '94.

6" x 8" pamphlet with four stories, each five or six pages in length. Three fables: "The Dog and the Rooster," TH, and TMCM. In the latter, the cat, cook, and dogs come apparently together. In fact, some text may have been lost somewhere in this fable: the mice seem to jump from discussion behind the door to being interrupted on top of the table. Only "The Wolf and the Kids" is not Aesopic. The colored illustrations do not rise above the average. I did not realize until I found the Nashville copy that the Colorado Springs copy was coverless!

1952 Pantschantantra: Fünf Bücher Altindischer Staatsweisheit und Lebenskunst in Fabeln und Sprüchen. Herausgegeben und übersetzt von Ludwig Alsdorf. Hardbound. Bergen II, Oberbayern: Müller & Kiepenheuer Verlag. DM 12 from J. Kitzinger, Munich, July, '96.

This little book wins a prize for the longest modern title! It seems a straightforward presentation of the Panchatantra text, complete with all the little rhyming verses. There are no illustrations. There are notes on 118-21 and a Nachwort on 122-125, followed by a T of C. The book may also win a prize for its creative cover combining block letters and simple animal pictures in maroon and blue.

1952 Quizzle Book of Favorite Stories. Irma and George Wilde. NY: Sam'l Gabriel Sons & Co. $.50 at Argosy in NY, Jan., '90.

Ho-hum games for ages eight to twelve, published when I was just about that age. The book offers in various forms a potpourri of popular kids' culture, from the Trojan Horse and Arachne to Little Black Sambo. The one fable used, in the "Hare and Tortoise" game (40) shows how Aesop lives and gets used. Some markings.

1952 Stories That Never Grow Old. Edited by Watty Piper. Illustrated by George and Doris Hauman. NY: Platt and Munk. See 1938/52.

1952 The Animal Story Book. Edited by Ernest Thompson-Seton. (c)1953 by Sarah M. Knapp. Chicago: Auxiliary Educational League. See 1902/38/52/53.

1952 The Animal Story Book. Edited by Ernest Thompson-Seton. (c)1955 by Sarah M. Knapp. Chicago: Auxiliary Educational League. See 1902/38/52/53/54/55.

1952 The Fables of Aesop now newly imprinted by Vincent Torre. #33 of 50. Hardbound. At The Ink-Well Press. $80 from And Books Too, Torrington, CT, through Choosebooks, Feb., '03. 

Gradually I am coming to the end of finding--and affording--the various fable works of Vincent Torre. This is another beautiful piece. This book is a surprisingly short 40 pages long and contains twenty fables. "The decoration was cut in linoleum," as the colophon reports. The brown initials were designed by Howard Glasser and cut in lineoleum by the printer. Besides the initials, there is a lovely brown printer's design repeated at the end of each fable. Each text reduces the print from 24 point to 18 point after four lines. Texts are in italics, but the morals are not. Torre's illustrations are simple and bold. Only the right-hand pages are printed. "The Rat and the Frog" here involves no cord connecting the two (16). The rat jumps on the frog's back and commands her to be off. She shakes him off in mid-water, but the hawk gets them both. In WC, the wolf utters the usual remark, but then bites off the crane's head (18)! When the jackdaw returns from the peacocks to his own kind, they peck at him harder than the peacocks had! This copy has slight water damage at the bottom of the covers, and the spine is torn at top and bottom.

1952 The Rat & the Convent Dove and other Tales & Fables. Paul Roche. Illustrated by Anne Scott. First edition. Dust jacket. Aldington, Kent: The Hand & Flower Press. $32.50 from Magnum Opus, Charlottesville, at Rosslyn Book Fair, March, '92.

The dust jacket is right: these stories are not to be swallowed in one gulp. I have many reactions. The title piece is a good put-down of the arrogant rat nicely placed in the clash of two worlds. At the other end of the book is "A Fable to End Fables": hyena learned at last to forget some wisdom and to begin again to play. So Paul Roche wrote to me in the inscription of his Aesop book: "Only one fable at a time!" On the negative side, wisdom may overwhelm the story in some cases ("The Muck-Beetle's Son" and "The Frog Who Would A-Wooing Go") or sentimentality may overwhelm it in others ("The Grateful Humming-Bird"). The best of the stories are "The Church Mice and the Pious Lady," "The Pig and the Plum Tree," and especially "The Barbary Ape." There is some straight Aesop here ("The Two Dogs," which is Aesop's DW) and some Aesop bent to new purposes ("The Tortoise and the Hare"). "The Llama's Yak" shows good insight: the more he listened to holy things, the more disagreeable he became. Many of these stories remind me of Tony DiMello. Overall, I would say that there is wisdom here but not as much cleverness as I would hope for. Scott's illustrations are curious. The best of them is on 10.

1952 The Road in Storyland. Edited by Watty Piper. Illustrated by Lucille W. and H.C. Holling. Platt and Munk. See 1932/52.

1952 Time for Fairy Tales old and new. Compiled by May Hill Arbuthnot. Various illustrators. Chicago: Scott, Foresman. Picked up long ago and found among my books in March, '88.

Ten pages (202-11) contain many fables from Aesop (in Joseph Jacobs' version) and some from Bidpai and La Fontaine. Simple, bold illustrations. The book, a good collection of children's literature, is designed especially for use in college classes in children's literature.

1952/53 Aesop's Fables. Illustrated by Anne Sellers Leaf. Hardbound. Edition of MCMLIII. Printed in USA. Chicago: Rand McNally. $1 from Doll & Toy Fair, State Fair Park, West Allis, WI, Oct., '99.

This is another hardbound version of the book I had found in many printings. See my comments there under "1952." This book makes no reference to "Tip-Top Elf Books." This book, which had lived both at the Peabody Institute in Danvers, MA, and at some Congregational Church School, has seen extensive use. It has a rather garish red and yellow cover and a library pocket-strip inside the back cover. A lot of young people learned their Aesop with this book!

1952/53 Forest Folk Tales: Fables and Parables From God's Great Outdoors. By Marian M. Schoolland. Illustrations by Reynold H. Weidenaar. Second printing. Hardbound. Printed in USA. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. $12.50 from Seattle Book Center, Seattle, July, '00.

Here are twelve stories that are not really fables. They seem rather sentimental parables meant for the very young. The named characters, like Johnny Woodchuck, learn optimism, cooperation, and good cheer. An appeal to God plays an important part in the two stories that I read. There is one black-and-white pen sketch per story. The illustrations dress the animals up in human clothing. There is a T of C at the front. Originally sold by W.W. Stirman in Waco, TX.

1952/61 The Rand McNally Book of Favorite Nursery Classics. Illustrated by Anne Sellers Leaf. Chicago: Rand McNally. (Aesop (c)1952, book apparently published in 1961.) $3.99 from Kay-Bee Toys. One extra copy.

A large-format collection. Thirty pages of Aesop's fables. All the illustrations are so "cute" that it is hard to find Aesop among these cuddlies. The fox in "The Fox and the Goat" looks like the cuddly fellow in TV advertisements that snuggles into clean wash. Not much to use here!

1952/1966 La Fontaine's Fables Translated into English Verse. Sir Edward Marsh. Dust jacket. Hardbound. Printed in Great Britain. London/NY: Everyman's Library No. 991: London: Dent/NY:Dutton. $10 Canadian from Ten Editions Bookstore, Toronto, June, '03.

This reprint enlarges the original 1952 Everyman edition in crown octavo. The margins have grown, and the paper has improved in quality. Here is what I wrote on the 1952 edition: "Dent/Dutton take over the text and preface that Marsh had published through Heinemann in 1931. It is good to have his lively tellings in this compact format without illustration. I did not know that the Everyman Library included LaFontaine. Marsh apparently published his first La Fontaine fables in 1925 (Forty-Two Fables of La Fontaine). His text was also used with Marie Angel's art in 1979 (Fables de la Fontaine, Neugebauer, 1979/81).

1952/70/82/86 Folk Tales from Korea. Third Edition, fourth printing. Collected and translated by Zong In-Sob. No illustrations. Dust jacket. Elizabeth, NJ, and Seoul: Hollym International Corp. Gift of Margaret Carlson Lytton, Summer, '88.

An excellent compendium of Korean folk literature. The fifteen-page section on fables (183-97) contains nineteen fables. "The Bald Old Man" (191) is very close to Aesop; the wife suspects a mistress and so the husband lets her pull out all the black hairs, and he is no longer attractive to the mistress. Most of these fables are stories about humans rather than animals; they are closer to our jokes than to our fables. Popular folk motifs show up: "Show me how you did it" ("The Ungrateful Tiger"); "No, X is greater than I" (which traces a circle in "The Rat's Bridegroom"); and "Give me the X who took my Y" (a young man parlays one grain into an ox in "A Grain of Millet").

1952/71 The Around-the-Year Storybook. Kathryn Jackson. Pictures by J.P. Miller. NY: Golden Press: Western Publishing Co. $2 at Royal St., New Orleans, April, '88.

A good example of a kids' book that contains only one fable among its approximately 120 stories, GA (70) with a simple watercolor illustration. The telling is nice, since it ends with the ant simply shutting the door behind him.

1952/80 Aesopica. A series of texts relating to Aesop or ascribed to him or closely connected with the literary tradition that bears his name. Ben Edwin Perry. Volume One: Greek and Latin Texts. Urbana: University of Illinois Press/NY: Arno Press. $75, ordered through Cardijn in Spring, '85.

The standard work for textual comparison. It is hard to know if it is worth $75, but at least the Arno Press version has the complete original. The standard work for textual comparison. It is hard to know if it is worth $75, but at least the Arno Press version has the complete original. The standard work for textual comparison. It is hard to know if it is worth $75, but at least the Arno Press version has the complete original. The standard work for textual comparison. It is hard to know if it is worth $75, but at least the Arno Press version has the complete original. The standard work for textual comparison. It is hard to know if it is worth $75, but at least the Arno Press version has the complete original. The standard work for textual comparison. It is hard to know if it is worth $75, but at least the Arno Press version has the complete original. The standard work for textual comparison. It is hard to know if it is worth $75, but at least the Arno Press version has the complete original. The standard work for textual comparison. It is hard to know if it is worth $75, but at least the Arno Press version has the complete original.

1952/83 Fables de La Fontaine. Illustrées par André Pec. Paris: Flammarion. 87 F at Bouquinerie du Centre, Metz, Sept., '92: purchased by Wendy Wright.

A beautiful oversize book with good monochrome and eight excellent full-page polychrome illustrations. The best of the monochrome illustrations are "The Coach and the Fly" (70) and "The Deer and the Vine" (109). The best of the polychrome are MSA (facing 12), TB (60), and "The Fox and the Wolf" (125). Others face 29, 45, 77, 93, and 108. T of C at the rear.

1952? A Selection of Aesop's Fables. Re-written especially for children by Barbara Sanders. Illustrated by Christopher Sanders. Dust jacket. Printed in Romania. London: Castle Books: Murray. $7.50 at Cummings Books, Dinkytown, Dec., '97. Four extra copies, including one with faded dust jacket for $4 at The Old Book Corner, Racine, Oct., '94, and one for $3 at Yesterday's Memories, July, '88.

T of C. No index. Many one-colored watercolors, with some full-colored pages (listed on 9). Though simple, some of the illustrations are quite attractive. The book is typical of recent editions for kids.

1952? Colour Show Pictures of Animal Fables. Printed in England. London: Juvenile Productions, Ltd.  Unicorn Books, Middlesex, Sept., '98. Extra copy for £8 from Stella Books, Tintern, UK, August, '00.

No. 9508. A large (over 12/5" x 9.5") folio containing eight full-page stories and, for each, a corresponding full page of illustration. Most are divided up into four panels. Some unusual features of the colorful illustrations may help to identify them. The sleeping hare has a handkerchief on top of his head. The leaping fox has checkered pants. The dog dives into the water to retrieve his lost bone. Young bear gets stung so badly that his mother has to bandage him and put him in bed. The country mouse has a particularly colorful valise. Doctor Stork flies away after the wolf snarls at him; earlier the wolf had hinted at a reward. The jackdaw is driven out by hat-wearing jackdaws. The title-page illustration is a single full-page picture of FC; its story is at the pamphlet's end. Identical front and back covers show a large saddle-shoed rabbit with a small turtle.

1952? The Country Mouse and the City Mouse and Other Stories. Watty Piper NA. Lucille W. and H.C. Holling NA. Pamphlet. Platt and Munk. See "1939?/52?".

1952? The Little Turtle That Could Not Stop Talking. And how brother rabbit fooled the whale and the elephant. Watty Piper NA. Lucille W. and H.C. Holling NA. Pamphlet. Platt and Munk. See "1939?/52?".

1952?/72 A Selection of Aesop's Fables. Re-written especially for children by Barbara Sanders. Illustrated by Christopher Sanders. Printed in Romania. Castle Books: Murray: London. $8 at Idle Time Books, Sept., '91. Extra copy for $4.60 from The Yesteryear Shoppe, Nampa, Idaho, March, '96.

A colored reprint of the 1952 edition with a different cover. Another reprint in 1974 has the same cover as this book but does the illustrations only in black-and-white. The three together say something in the history of book printing. Notice that this reprint of a Romanian book was done in Poland.

1952?/74 A Selection of Aesop's Fables. Re-written especially for children by Barbara Sanders. Illustrated by Christopher Sanders. Printed in Romania. Castle Books: Murray: London. $4.50 at Erasmus, South Bend, May, '95. Extra copy for $6 on the Oregon coast, Aug., '87.

This book is the same as the previous book, except that the pictures are all done in black-and-white. This book has the rare distinction of separating the two pages of T of C to put in between a page containing only "This book belongs to...."

1953 A Selection of Aesop's Fables. From a New Translation for Modern Readers. Illustrated by Mary Honor Stonehouse. Dust jacket. Presented as a Memento of the Conference for Heads of Printing Departments at Tor Lodge, Wolverhampton, April, '55. Wolverhampton: Printing Department, Wolverhampton College of Art. Gift of June Clinton, June, '93.

What a beautiful gift! Sharp translations of 118 fables are accompanied by thirteen lovely black-and-white engravings and monochrome and two-color washes. My favorites among the illustrations are of the old woman and her maids (5), 2W (15), and the old woman and the doctor (19). The versions include pointed and proverbial morals. Three of my favorites are "Boast before your betters and be laughed at for a fool" for "The Lion and the Donkey" (1), "Good wishes from an enemy make the wise man nervous" for "The Hen and the Cat" (7), and "The smaller the mind the greater the conceit" for "The Gnat and the Bull" (30). As June herself commented, this is indeed a rare modern Aesop. Dust jacket signed by Charles L. Pickering, who designates himself as "Tor-Mentor." A real treasure!

1953 A Woman as Great as the World and Other Fables. By Jacquetta Hawkes. Identical with her Fables of the same year. NY: Random House. $4.95 at Avol's, Madison, WI, Aug., '90.

The stories I sampled this time bear heavily on original sin and mortality. The first evokes the "fall" in terms of destructive scientific curiosity. The garden's symbol of splendor and religious awe, the red admiral butterfly, is half-destroyed through analysis. The title story evokes woman's awakening to independence and negative emotion. Not for kids. Unresolved. Biography at the end. Neither edition mentions the other.

1953 Aesop in Modern Dress. Done In Verse By Alice C.D. Riley. Pen and ink drawings by Phyllis Bailey. (#306 in a?) Limited edition of 1000. Dust jacket. Claremont, CA: Saunders Press. $12.50 by mail from W. Trevor Blake, Portland, May, '96. Extra copy for $3 at Book City Paradise, Portland, March, '96.

I had not known of this book, found it in an unlikely paperback barn I happened upon while walking from someplace else in Portland, and then found the same virtually unknown, limited edition book being offered me again within two months! The Blake copy has "#306" written in the upper right corner of the title-page. There are eighty-three fables with seventeen illustrations. The best of the illustrations may be FG (39): the fox sits on the ground disgruntled. The rhyme of the rhyming couplets pushes the versions into some infelicities. Examples include the moral for "The Ant and the Fly" (55), the last two lines of "Jupiter and Pallas" (60), and the whole of FK (98-99). Sometimes the couplets become prosaic, as in the second moral on 51. I do not find much "modern dress"; the braggart about Rhodes has now become a golfer (58). Riley sometimes supposes that we know the story; she thus presumes that we know that the milkmaid had the milk on her head (70-71). There are some surprising differences in how the stories are presented here. Thus the donkey in MSA ran to a broken bridge and fell in (23). Both the fox and the wolf not only lost but had to pay court costs (29). The man with two wives was old (36). The mouse that nibbled itself a small hole to get into the basket now has to wait to get slim enough to get back out, but then will be eaten in any case by a weasel (54). Only one lie is enough to lose your credibility in BW (67). The dog about whom the cock tells the fox is real (100). The moral for CP is "Little by little does the trick" (105). The lion's partners in the hunt are the jackal, the wolf, and the fox (109). The hare with many friends ends up using her own swift heels to disappear (124). There are also some very good interpretations. According to the moral in GA, "The best of life must find a way/to bring together work and play" (40). "The Fox and the Cat" (87) has a good moral (even if the story itself lacks important quotation marks at the end of its second stanza): "Sometimes God's gifts to Mortal Man/Are so profuse he scarcely can/Decide which gift to cultivate,/And so wastes time until too late." Both the ending and the accompanying illustration are excellent in the book's last fable, "The Ape and Her Young" (136): "But the neglected Ape was quick and able./He managed to escape from out this Fable."

1953 Aesop's Fables. Illustrated by Anne Sellers Leaf. Hardbound. Edition of MCMLIII. Printed in USA. Chicago: Rand McNally.  See 1952/53.

1953 Die Letzte Blume: Eine Parabel und 27 Fabeln für unsere Zeit. Von James Thurber; Deutsch von H.M. Ledig-Rowohlt. James Thurber. Paperbound. Hamburg: Rororo Taschenbuch: Rowohlt. DM 5 from an unknown source, August, '01.

The second half of this paperback is a translation of Thurber's Fables for Our Times, complete with the illustrations. The first half is a work I did not know: "The Last Flower." It is like a children's "flip-book." One holds the book sideways, so that the left-hand page becomes the top. These top pages contain simple sentences. The lower pages are Thurber's cartoons. The story tells how World War XII destroys civilization. One flower starts a process whereby humans find life again. They build things up until there are again soldiers and conflicts. The war this time destroys everything, except one man, one woman, and a flower. The book lacks both covers and is in as tender a condition as that last flower on earth.

1953 Fables. By Jacquetta Hawkes. Identical with her A Woman as Great as the World and Other Fables of the same year. Dust jacket. London: The Cresset Press. $4.50, Summer, '89. Extra copy for $4.75 from Scotland or England, July, '92.

Seventeen short stories and one long one. Though some stories have talking animals and creatures, the four I tried as a sample seemed to me to be more short stories than fables. Maybe good for comparison with Aesop sometime to see how the brief fable does things the longer piece cannot.

1953 Fables and Other Little Tales. Kenneth Patchen. Paperbound. Printed in Germany. Karlsruhe/Baden: Jonathan Williams, Publisher. $150 from Seattle Book Center, Seattle, July, '00.

None of these pieces had appeared in print before. Many of them later appear in Aflame and Afun of Walking Faces (1970). By contrast with that book, there are no illustrations here. The last page adds some publication information, but I am not certain of its bearing. It speaks of a regular edition of 450 by "Verlagsdruckerei Gebr. Tron KG" in Karlsruhe-Durlach; it gives an address for Jonathan Williams in Highlands, NC; and it says that this book was designed by Williams and Patchen "as Jargon 6." That all is more than I can cope with! And exactly that remark again fits my experience with this book, as it did my experience with the 1970 volume. If I get the merest inkling of what is going on in the short pieces here, I am happy. Perhaps I just cannot keep up with all the category shifts and jumps. The closest I come to sense occurs in pieces like "He Didn't Know the Son Was Loaded" (37) and "The Number That Comes After Feve" (91), but even there I am largely unsure of what I am reading. With regret I give up after having read only part of this book.

1953 Fables: Feng Hsueh-feng. Feng Hsueh-feng, translated by Gladys Yang. Woodcuts by Huang Yung-yu. Stated first edition. Hardbound. Peking: Foreign Languages Press. AU $2.99 from I. Gibson, Ingle Farm, Adelaide, Australia, July, '04. 

Once this book arrived, I thought it a repeat of something I already have. Closer inspection shows that I have a softbound second edition of 1955, while this is the first edition of 1953. Apparently the order of fables changed significantly in the second edition, though there are fifty-one fables here as there. As I mention there, the fables are often directly admonitory and/or of a highly political slant. Thus the author writes of skylarks "Poets like these are the true friends of the people" (6). The best of the fables, I believe, are "The Snake and the Rabbit" (42) and "The Original Rat" (61), which may also have the best illustration. Among the most overtly political are those on the imperialist weasel munching a duckling (27) and the imperialist snake against the collective bees (29). Other good fables include "The Hunter and His Wife" (12), "The Lion and the Setting Sun" (15), "The Lion and the Lamb" (34), "The Fox and the Rabbits' Farm" (39), "The Cow and Her Rope" (53), "The Curious Crow" (44), and "The Cow and Her Calf" (54). There is a T of C at the front.

1953 Fables for Foresters. Collected and edited by John D. Guthrie. Illustrated by Rudolph A. Wendelin. Washington, D.C.: Forestry Enterprises. $12.50 from Greg Williams, Nov., '95.

This book is just about what one would expect it to be: a collection of yarns about forest rangers. A typical-and good-example is "The Fable of the Indignant Denudatic" (30). The book stumbles into real fables on at least two occasions. "The Old Ranger" (19) reads just like the Aesopic fable on the old dog, and "The District Office in Labour" (39) seems to be patterned on the Aesopic "Mountain in Labor." There is an AI of authors on 63.

1953 Far East Stories for Pleasure Reading. By Edward W. Dolch, Marguerite P. Dolch, and Beulah F. Jackson. Illustrated by Marguerite Dolch. Hardbound. Dust jacket. Printed in USA. Champaign, IL: Pleasure Reading Series: Garrard Publishing Company. $4 from Carolina Bookshop, Charlotte, NC, June, '97. Extra copy a gift of Creighton Classics Library, Aug., '93.

"Far East" here includes China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Tibet, and India. There are eighteen stories, each with a simple full-page illustration featuring orange coloring. The early Chinese and Japanese stories here involve a good deal of magic, with ogres and dragons. Two of the stories are particularly touching. The first encompasses the first two selections here (1, 11). The emperor's daughter finally finds a suitor who can give her a blue rose, since she loves him so much that she declares that this white rose is blue. And the boy who paints cats draws a huge screen full of them, and they slay the ogre who has ravaged this temple (31). "The Mirror That Made Trouble" (71) has fun with a family's first experience of a mirror. The two Tibetan stories on the stone lion (81, 89) are a good comment on greed. "The Maker of Puppets" (99) is the wistful Indonesian story of a man who watches a (chess?) game and returns to find that time has passed and it is now decades later. Another Indonesian tale qualifies as a fable, I believe. It features the mouse deer who falls into a lime pit (109). He starts to announce that only those in the lime pit will be saved on this day when the world is coming to an end. And anyone who sneezes cannot be allowed in the pit. After he gets several large animals into the pit with him, he sneezes and is thrown out! "The Stone Crusher" (119), another fable, goes through a progression like that in "The Mouse's Marriage." Whatever the stone crusher wishes to be, he becomes. In succession he becomes a rajah, the sun, a cloud, the wind, and a mountain--in each case learning that the next is stronger than he. As a mountain, he learns that the stone crusher is stronger than he is. So now he is a contented stone crusher. "The Tiger, the Brahman, and the Jackal" (127) and "The Mice That Ate the Iron Balance" (137) are traditional fables from India. This is the first time I have seen a balance made the subject of the story's controversy. The last pair of stories tell of the brave potmaker who happened, while looking for his donkey, upon a tiger who had heard an old woman proclaim in a storm that the "dripping" was attacking her worse than any elephant or tiger. In the dark, the potmaker mistook the tiger for his donkey, and the tiger mistook the potmaker for a dripping. The result: the potmaker became rich and famous for subduing a fierce tiger! Soon the potmaker was summoned to command a great army being attacked. He ends up being tied to a fierce horse, holding a tree in his hands, and riding through the enemy camp. The enemy army gives up without a fight!

1953 Folk Tales and Fables. Collected by Phebean Itayemi and P. Gurrey. Paperbound. London: West African Series: Penguin Books. $5 from an unknown source, June, '98?

Unfortunately, I find no Aesopic fables here in the fifty-two stories that are offered. There is plenty of magic and incantation and trick in these stories. They are from various sources: Yoruba, Isoko, Gold Coast, and Sierra Leone. The introduction stresses that folk tales include jokes, puns, and songs. There are several propositions in the introduction that I may not easily be able to bring together, e.g., that these stories are for entertainment, not morality--but they portray a way of life and a tradition. The issues addressed by the stories include war, slavery, the separation from family that comes with war and slavery, discord in polygamy, childlessness, and famine. The closest to a fable may be #28. The tortoise fools his wife three times but not the fourth time. Another story close to a fable is #29: The tortoise steals yams in a coffin five times, but the sixth time people stop and punish him. Story #35 is really OF with an aetiological close. We learn why frogs say "Oho" and why they swell up.

1953 Forest Folk Tales: Fables and Parables From God's Great Outdoors. By Marian M. Schoolland. Illustrations by Reynold H. Weidenaar. Second printing. Hardbound. Printed in USA. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 1952/53.

1953 La Fontaine: Fables. Imagées par Romain Simon. Printed in France. Paris?: Les Albums Roses: Librairie de Hachette. 25 Francs from Brancion Sunday Used Book Market, Paris, August, '99.

Four fables are announced on the title-page of this 6.5"x8" kids' book: MSA, "Le Loup Devenu Berger," UP, and WL. They occur in just the opposite order! The La Fontaine text is unchanged. Of the simple, lively colored illustrations, the first and last may be the best. Both illustrate MSA. The former, on the title-page, shows a disgruntled father with a happy child as both sit on the beast. The latter pictures the two flanking the beast and walking arm-in-arm with it. Now all three are happy!

1953 La Fontaine: Fables Complètes. Illustrations de Dandelot. #603 of 6000. Paperbound. Paris: Collection Athêna-Luxe: Éditions Athêna. £10.50 from Bookmark, Cardiff, UK, through eBay, Nov., '05. 

This is a nice looking edition. It may be easiest to compare and contrast it with Dandelot's other La Fontaine edition, from Panthéon in 1961. This edition uses blue for titles and black for texts. Here, as there, no editor is acknowledged. Here, as there, I like the Dandelot water-color illustrations. They are again big, bold, and colorful. Here are the illustrations that I find: FC (cover); WL (16); LM (48); FM (64); "The Old Lion" (96); "The Lion and the Vines" (128); TH (160); "The Fox and the Wolf" (192); "The Fox and the Goat" (224)' and "The Lamb, the Goat, and the Pig" (256). The artist has fun with the illustrations, as when he has the pig in the last illustration weeping. The cover illustration may be the strongest of the whole lot: both characters have strong human expressions on their faces. This book does not have the monochrome designs found in the other volume. Notice the even spacing of the illustrations thirty-two pages apart; this "rule" is violated only once near the beginning, when there are only sixteen pages between LM (48) and FM (64). There is an AI at the back. This book is not in Bodemann or Bassy.

1953 Sämtliche Fabeln und Schwänke von Hans Sachs. In chronologischer Ordnung nach den Originalen herausgegeben von Edmund Goetze. Zweite Auflage besorgt von Hans Lothar Markschies, 1. Band. Hardbound. Halle/Saale: Nr. 110-117 Neudrucke deutscher Literaturwerke des XVI. Und XVII. Jahrhunderts: VEB Max Niemeyer Verlag. €5 from Antiquariat Revers, Berlin, August, '08.

One rarely finds a book with more material to include from its title-page! At any rate, here is a volume packed with original material. As the early T of C points out, there are exactly two hundred numbered items here; all are in verse. I checked out the first hundred items and found seven identified as fables: #3 FM; 15 WL; 21 "Frogs and Hares"; 22 DLS; 23 "Wolf and Lying Shepherd"; 24 "Greedy and Envious"; and 47 GA. There were also a number of anecdotes from the life of Aesop, which were not marked as fables. Sachs' fables are relatively easy to make out. Several things are unusual in this book. First, the T of C does not give the genre of a piece, but the individual title above the piece does. Secondly, each writing is dated by day, month, and year. Becker's anthology has helpful biographical information. Sachs was born in Nurnberg in 1494 and apprenticed as a shoemaker. He joined the Reformation early. He became a meistersinger and created a wide variety of literature, including some 6000 poetic works.

1953 The Animal Story Book. Edited by Ernest Thompson-Seton. (c)1953 by Sarah M. Knapp. Chicago: Auxiliary Educational League. See 1902/38/52/53.

1953 The Animal Story Book. Edited by Ernest Thompson-Seton. (c)1955 by Sarah M. Knapp. Chicago: Auxiliary Educational League. See 1902/38/52/53/54/55.

1953 The Fables of Leonardo da Vinci. Vincent Torre. #6 of 50. First edition. Paperbound. At The Ink-Well Press. $75 from Brick Walk Bookshop, West Hartford, CT, through Bibliofind, Dec., '98.

Gradually I am finding the various fable works of Vincent Torre. This is another beautiful piece. The booklet includes fifteen fables and seventeen entries from Leonardo's Bestiary. The fables are strong on one-upping arguments. The usual question is: Who will laugh last? Among them is a favorite of mine from Leonardo, "The Nut and the Campanile" (18). Leonardo's fables are sometimes very sad, like "The Willow & The Gourd" (9). The willow's romance turns into her destruction. "The Ant & The Grain of Millet" (15) is much happier. The grain asks the ant to let it reproduce, offering a hundredfold. The ant takes the offer. The Beaver shows up in the Bestiary as "Peace," and Leonardo tells the story often found among fables. The beaver bites off its "testacles" (sic) and leaves them for its enemies and so escapes. The mole is "Lies," since it lives as long as it remains in the dark but dies as soon as it comes into the light. The first nine fables get a delightful woodcut each. There is also a repeated design cut in wood.

1953 The Fables of Moronia. Herbert C. Holdridge. Illustrated by Daphne and Venetia Epler. Signed by author. Dust jacket. Sherman Oaks, CA: The Holdridge Foundation. $3.50 at Booknook Parnassus, Evanston, May, '89. One extra copy for $10 with author's inscription and tattered dust jacket and one copy for $2 without either, both from Book Castle, Burbank, Aug., '93. One paperback copy, signed, for $13 from The Book House on Grand, Jan., '97.

One of the weirdest books I own. Heavily political "fables" directed at the stupidity of U.S. policies. There is nothing really Aesopic here in the content. The prose is a mishmash of cliche, biblical image, King James prose, and who knows what else! Note that the author published his own book. I have tried reading it twice. Good luck!

1953 The Fastest Hound Dog in the State of Maine. By John Gould. Illustrated by F. Wenderoth Saunders. Dust jacket. NY: William Morrow and Company. $18 from Greg Williams, June, '94.

A self-proclaimed Maine story! Lots of delightful illustrations. The flyleaf begins by saying "Aesop was a good man...but his fables are somewhat removed from present-day reality." The special feature of this engaging to-be-read-at-one-sitting book is the author's tongue-in-cheek collection of scholarly notes on 67-92. There is a delightful finish worthy of the story.

1953 The Man Who Stood On His Hands: A Fable. By Harry Hoehn as told to Doris Mazon Hoehn. #199 of 250. Signed by Harry Hoehn. Hand-set and printed by the authors. Spiral bound. Printed in USA. NY: The Piper's Press. $10 from Beck's Antiques & Books, Fredericksburg, Dec., '98.

People laugh at the man who walks on his hands. A stranger offers to help him. It turns out that this stranger is an artist, and he paints a face on the man's bottom. Now the others guffaw. When pressed as to why they laugh so hard now, one responds "Because we never, NO NEVER saw a fellow with TOES on the ends of such big ears." So ends the story. There are three careful hand-corrections in this short work. Spiral bound. The covers are a speckled cream and black.

1953 The Panchatantra. Translated from the Sanskrit by Arthur W. Ryder. Paperback. Phoenix. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. See 1925/53/56/64.

1953 Walt Disney's Treasury. Arranged by Steffi Fletcher and Jane Werner. Pictures by the Walt Disney Studio. Adapted by Dick Kelsey. Assisted by Dick Moores. Hardbound. Printed in USA. NY: A Giant Golden Book: Golden Press. $12 from Larchmere Antiques, Cleveland, Jan, '00.

This large-format book in typical Disney and Golden Press style contains two fables among its twenty-one stories: TH (42) and GA (98), both done in a two-page spread and both with full-color illustrations. Many other pages in the book are done in two colors (e.g., black and red). TH uses Max Hare and Toby Tortoise from the early Disney tradition. Max still has his boxer's cape. "Cocky Max Hare decided he could take time out for a nap." Most other versions do not make the nap a matter of conscious decision. The art style is updated from the earliest Disney presentations of this fable. GA is true to other Disney presentations of the fable. See The Wonderful World of Walt Disney's Fantasyland (1965), on which Kelsey and Moores also collaborated. The ants have an underground home entered through a trap-door apparently flush with the ground. The grasshopper starts out singing "Oh, the world owes me a living" and finishes singing "Oh, I owe the world a living!" As in other Disney versions, Andy Ant takes up the grasshopper's invitation to play, and the ants take him in, give him a hot bath, and order him to work by playing his fiddle for them. The book's spine is deteriorating and it shows a few stains.

1953 Zwei Fabeln: Der gute Löwe; Der treue Stier. Ernest Hemingway. Einzig autorisierte Übertragung von Annemarie Horschitz-Horst. Den Freunden des Verlages als Weihnachts- und Neujahrsgruss zugeeignet. Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag. DM 18 from Daras, Düsseldorf, July, '95.

Two witty stories that may stretch beyond the limits I would want to put on fable. The sophisticated flying aristocratic lion from Venice learned how primitive his fellow lions in Africa were. The faithful steer was faithful to fighting and to his lady, and his faithfulness impressed the matador who killed him. The stories raise good questions. I would probably put them into the category of "parable."

1953/55 Fables. Feng Hsueh-Feng. Translated by Gladys Yang. Woodcuts by Huang Yung-yu. Second edition. Peking: Foreign Languages Press. $10 by mail from W. Trevor Blake, May, '96.

This large-format softbound booklet contains fifty-one fables, often directly admonitory and/or of a highly political slant. Thus the author writes of skylarks "Poets like these are the true friends of the people" (7). The best of the fables, I believe, are "The Snake and the Rabbit" (38) and "The Original Rat" (68), which may also have the best illustration. Among the most overtly political are those on the imperialist weasel munching a duckling (22) and the imperialist snake against the collective bees (35). Other good fables include "The Hunter and His Wife" (13), "The Lion and the Setting Sun" (19), "The Lion and the Lamb" (43), "The Fox and the Rabbits' Farm" (51), "The Cow and Her Rope" (52), "The Curious Crow" (55), and "The Cow and Her Calf" (64). I am delighted when dealers find out-of-the-way items like this one!

1953/56 La Fontaine: Fables. Imagées par Romain Simon. Canvas-bound. Paris?: Les Albums Roses: Librairie de Hachette. $4 from Luc Gauvreau, March, '03.

Here is a later printing and a better copy of a book first published in 1953. The collection, shown on the verso of the title-page, has grown in the meantime. I repeat my comments from there. Four fables are announced on the title-page of this 6.5"x8" kids' book: MSA, "Le Loup Devenu Berger," UP, and WL. They occur in just the opposite order! The La Fontaine text is unchanged. Of the simple, lively colored illustrations, the first and last may be the best. Both illustrate MSA. The former, on the title-page, shows a disgruntled father with a happy child as both sit on the beast. The latter pictures the two flanking the beast and walking arm-in-arm with it. Now all three are happy!

1953/58 John Ploughman's Talk or Plain Advice for Plain People. By C.H. Spurgeon. London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, Ltd. $1.50 at Recycle Book Store, San Jose, Aug., '92.

I admit that I have read only two pages of this book (154-5). It seems a non-stop barrage of one-liners. The author does indeed, as the cover illustration suggests, take the bull by the horns! I picked the book up because its frontispiece of Aesop's fox and crow depicts the book's insight: "The fox admires the cheese, not the raven" (154). My two pages had lots of good zingers in them, like "He who believes in promises made at elections has long ears, and may try to eat thistles." I suspect there are many more fable-related proverbs along the way in the book, but for now I will let someone else find them. This printing represents the 544th thousand.

1953/59 Shaggy Dog and other Surrealist Fables. Told by John Waller. Illlustrated by Frank Wilson. Inscribed by and with an original drawing by Waller. Second printing. Hardbound. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. $45 from Blue Mountain Books & Manuscripts, Catskill, NY, through abe, Nov., '02. 

I count about sixty-two fables on 67 pages, with five pages afterwards of notes and comments. The illustrations are humorous journalistic cartoons. Waller writes in the Preface that these stories bear comparison with the enigmatic art of Klee, the bizarre landscapes of Dali, or the haunted forests of Max Ernst. In fact, his first two paragraphs are a fine description of a surrealist fable. My impression from reading more than half of the stories is that they are more "jokes" than surrealist fables. A number are funny. I am not yet convinced that they work the way Klee, Dali, and Ernst do. Among the best for me are "The Two Farmers" (19) and "The Madman Who Was Cured" (36). "The Original Shaggy Dog Story" is excellent (28). Is it perhaps part of the book's tongue-in-cheek that there really is no "original" shaggy dog story? It strikes me that one generation's shaggy dog is the next generation's old hat. Many of these jokes might have been very strong the first time that a particular category was violated; successive category fractures are less humorous or revealing, I think. This copy is inscribed by Waller, and its first page has an original drawing by Waller.

1953/62 A Critical History of Children's Literature: A Survey of Children's Books in English from Earliest Times to the Present. By Cornelia Meigs, Anne Thaxter Eaton, Elizabeth Nesbitt, and Ruth Hill Viguers. Decorations by Vera Bock. Hardbound. Printed in USA. NY: The Macmillan Company. $10 from an unknown source, July, '96.

I had decided not to include this book in the collection when I took another look at its four references to fables. While the chief emphasis on Caxton is his transmission of Arthurian material by Malory, there is a valuable reflection here on Caxton's Aesop (33-34). "Finally, he did give to the English world and its posterity perhaps the oldest and the most widely beloved of the ancient classics. People have long read Aesop who could not read the Aeneid" (34). I had not known, by the way, that Caxton finished the last of his translations the day before he died. On 89-90 there is valuable material on Lady Eleanor Fenn and on William Godwin. Fenn's sense of fable is presented with a good edge. "Fables are stories to teach children what they should do, 'by showing them what may happen to them if they do not act as they ought to do'" (89). I am happy to see something here about Godwin, who used the pen-name Edward Baldwin. He married Mary Wollstonecraft and set up with her a small publishing company which brought out children's books, including Edward Baldwin's Fables, Ancient and Modern. Charles Lamb, whose works the two published, said of Godwin, "A middle sized man, both in stature and understanding" (90)! The Lambs--but not necessarily the Godwins--stood up against the "Age of Admonition" in their literature for children. Isaiah Thomas of Worcester and Boston and Hugh Gaine of New York are discussed on 132 as following the lead of London's John Newbery. Mention is made here of Fables in Verse with the Conversations of Beasts and Birds by Woglog the Great Giant, which were published around 1762. Gay's fables are mentioned on 156 as written ostensibly for the six-year-old Duke of Cumberland. But satire rather than moral teaching is the burden of these fables, and their language is aimed more at parents than at children. "They are keener and more ungentle than the kindly tales of Aesop, while the vehicle of long-drawn-out rhyme is much less effective than the old homely prose" (156).

1953/62 Fraulein Bo-Peepen and More Tales Mein Grossfader Told. By Dave Morrah, with drawings by the author. NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. $1 at Rock Creek Bookshop, DC, Oct., '90.

Eight fables near the end of the book in the familiar Morrah style. The best of these for storytelling are WC and "The Bundle of Twigs" and for illustrations FC and WC. I paid $20 for another volume of Morrah's, so this was a real find in an unlikely old store!

1953/64 Trois Fables de La Fontaine. Hachette Mini-Livres #29. Printed in Holland. Paris: Hachette. $15 from Kelmscott, June, '95.

Exceptionally sharp colored illustrations in this small pamphlet of WL, "le Loup devenu berger," and MSA. At the end of the latter, the illustration has the miller, son, and ass dancing together. I would love now to get #27 in the series, "Quatre Fables de La Fontaine."

1953/66 La Fontaine Fables. Images de Romain Simon. Hardbound. Paris?: Grands Albums Hachette: Hachette. $5.60 from Betty Newlin, Winchester, VA, through eBay, July, '04. 

My, Romain Simon illustrated many different books! This is a 28-page oversized (9" x 12½") children's book. There are eleven fables in all, each allotted one to three pages. At least five of them are included somehow in the endpieces at both ends of the book. The stories include GA, FC, FG, LM, TMCM, TH, MM, "The Fox and the Goat," WL, FS, and TT. Each story gets from one to three pages. Has the lively, skipping rabbit appeared in Simon's work before? The scarf and shawl on the tortoise make me think I have seen these characters before! This book once belonged to the Shelter Island Elementary School.

1953/67 Quatre Fables de La Fontaine. Paperbound. Paris: Hachette Mini-Livres #144: Hachette. $10 from The Bookshop, Grand Junction, CO, through Choosebooks.com, Feb., '03. 

Apparently a fellow member in the same series as "Trois Fables de La Fontaine," which I have listed under "1953/64." The numbering has changed, however. That pamphlet was #29 but now seems to be #143. This pamphlet was perhaps #27 and is now #144. As in that case, there are exceptionally sharp colored illustrations in this small pamphlet. FC, MM, TT, and "The Fox and the Goat." Maybe the best of the designs is of Perrette skipping; the milk pail is already tipping.

1953/70 La Fontaine Fables. Images de Romain Simon. Hardbound. Paris?: Grands Albums Hachette: Hachette. $5 from James Richter, Kingston, NY, through eBay, Oct., '05. 

See my earlier version of this book, listed under 1953/66. I ordered this one through eBay because it was listed as published in 1953. I will keep trying for a first edition. Whereas that book was printed in France, this was printed in Italy. Let me repeat my remarks from there: My, Romain Simon illustrated many different books! This is a 28-page oversized (9" x 12½") children's book. There are eleven fables in all, each allotted one to three pages. At least five of them are included somehow in the endpieces at both ends of the book. The stories include GA, FC, FG, LM, TMCM, TH, MM, "The Fox and the Goat," WL, FS, and TT. Has the lively, skipping rabbit appeared in Simon's work before? The scarf and shawl on the tortoise make me think I have seen these characters before!

1953/74 Trois Braves Petits Boucs et Le Loup and les Chevreaux: Fables. Illustrations de Richard Scarry. Pamphlet. Les Petits Livres d'Argent. Printed in France. Paris: Éditions des Deux Coqs d'Or. $2 from Pierre Cantin, Montreal, Feb., '02.

What we have here is the fairytales "Three Billy Goats Gruff" and "The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats." Only the cover has the word "Fables" at all. The series is like Western's "Little Golden Books." This sixteen-page pamphlet, 6" x 7½", is published in conjunction with Western Publishing Company, Inc., Racine.

1953/83 La Fontaine Fables. Images de Romain Simon. Hardbound. Paris?: Le Jardin des Rêves: Hachette. $5.90 from Marie Gervais, St.-Urbain-Premier, Quebec, Canada, through eBay, Oct., ‘07.

I have two other versions of this book, listed under 1953/66 and 1953/70. Both belong to the series "Grands Albums Hachette." This book is identical internally but belongs to the series "Le Jardin des Rêves" and features on its front cover a detail of the title-page's larger illustration. The back cover is identical with the back cover on the other editions. As I wrote there, this is a 28-page oversized (9" x 12½") children's book. There are eleven fables in all, each allotted one to three pages. At least five of them are included somehow in the endpieces at both ends of the book. The stories include GA, FC, FG, LM, TMCM, TH, MM, "The Fox and the Goat," WL, FS, and TT. This copy once belonged to the Greek Orthodox community in Laval and its primary school named after Demosthenes.

1953? My Book of Fables: From the Tales of La Fontaine. Enid Blyton. Illustrated by Romain Simon. London & Sydney: A Little Gift Book: Hackett's: Hachette. AUS $6.75 from Valerie Greaves, Davoren Park South, Australia, through eBay, Oct., '02. Extra copy for $20 Australian from Pioneer Books, Oaklands Park, South Australia, through ChooseBooks, Feb., '03.

It is curious that the same book showed up, after years of apparent absence from the market, twice within four months, and in both cases from Australia. Neither copy is in good shape, and so I will keep them both in the collection. The format resembles that of a Little Golden Book: the book is a little larger than 6" x 7½", with stiff board covers stapled together. There are four stories on 28 pages: FC, MM, TT, and "The Fox and the Goat." The telling of MM omits mention of dresses and dances; Perrette feels so happy thinking about her future cow and calf capering in the fields that she jumps for joy. So Blyton teaches me something; that is indeed how La Fontaine tells the story! The inside covers present mirror-images of FC. Hachette holds the copyright. Is Hackett a British subsidiary of Hachette?

1953?/59 The Arbuthnot Anthology of Children's Literature. Compiled by May Hill Arbuthnot. Illustrated by Arthur Paul, John Averill, Wade Ray, Seymour Rosofsky, Debi Sussman, and Rainey Bennett. Designed by Hal Kearney. Sixth printing? Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company. $5.95 at Downtown Books, Milwaukee, Nov., '95.

The center section of three long sections is identical with Time for Fairy Tales (1952). It is fun to compare this first edition with the fourth edition of The Arbuthnot Anthology (1961/71/76). This has some 1006 pages to the later edition's 1088. The short fable section (200-211) includes seventeen fables of Aesop to the twelve in the later edition. This earlier edition also has two fables from Bidpai; the later edition will say that they are from the Panchatantra and offer one more fable. Both editions have the same three offerings from La Fontaine. The fable introduction undergoes some changes. T of C at the beginning. The fable section of the bibliography is on 383.

1954 12 Fables of Aesop. Linoleum blocks by Antonio Frasconi to illustrate Twelve Fables of Aesop newly narrated by Glenway Wescott and published by the Museum of Modern Art, NY. #152 of 975. Signed by Frasconi, Wescott, and Joseph Blumenthal of The Spiral Press. Signed with an inscription by Frasconi. Boxed, with slipcase. $85 at Old New York Book Shop, Atlanta, April, '94.

Is it just the amount I had to pay for it that makes me much more partial to Frasconi's art here than I had been to it in the smaller booklets done at the same time? The stories still seem to me to represent unfortunate compromises or attempts to find meaning in the meaningless. Wescott misses the "countdown" effect in the first fable, "The Starved Farmer and His Fat Dogs." The flattered raven has "his mouth full of something delicious." Why cannot the something be either meat or cheese? "The Fishermen with the Stone in Their Net" addresses a case of disillusionment but illogically argues that they are now more likely to catch fish tomorrow. Maybe someone else can find more point in this TH moral than I do: "Persistent ambition without talent breaks no record. Talent without character wins no race."

1954 12 Fables of Aesop. Linoleum blocks by Antonio Frasconi to illustrate Twelve Fables of Aesop newly narrated by Glenway Wescott and published by the Museum of Modern Art, NY. Hardbound for $8 from Second Chance, April, '93.

See my comments on the original and the later paperback listed under 1954/67.

1954 Aesop Confounded: Tales and Fables old and new. Vincent Torre. #48 of 50. NY?: At the Ink-Well Press. $28.50 from Carl Sandler Berkowitz, April, '95.

Four of the booklet's eleven stories are identified as fables. The suggestion in the title is that we have anti-fables here. Most of the stories work that way, in fact. Thus the moral to "Little Red Hen" is "Always try to get away with as little work as you can" and to "Buttercup" "Hags' bags should be knife-proof." "The Cat and the Fox" (8) works with a fox, the string of whose bag of tricks had become a tangled knot, to arrive at this moral: "Use zippers." "The Mice and the Cat" (19) proclaims at its end "The best-belled Cats are sleeping ones." "The Sparrow Whose Tongue Was Cut" (23) is strange, as the sparrow suddenly starts talking in mid-story. Perhaps I am missing something! All three of these fables have full-page illustrations. "The Camel and the Jackal" (27), unillustrated, seems to me to be told straight. Torre's moral for it is "A Camel's revenge is dangerous." "The Alligator and the Jackal" (30) seems to me not to be a fable, nor is it labelled as one. It goes through five phases and involves some preternatural events. I am amazed that Carl found this book for me!

1954 Aesop's Fables. Selected and edited by Laura Harris. Illustrated by Tony Palazzo. Dust jacket. Garden City, NY: Garden City Books. $12.50 at Bowie, Seattle, July, '93. Extra copy with different cover, end papers, and binding for $13.50 from Nicholas Potter, Santa Fe, May, '93. Extra copies like the Bowie version for $6 at Midway, March, '88, and, without dust jacket, for $18 from Book Lady Jane Carlen, Silver Spring Bookfair, Sept., '91.

Large and not very impressive pastels. The Midway and Silver Spring copies are particularly well-made books: the two-page pictures (like that of CP) match perfectly. The Santa Fe version may be a school copy, with a reinforced binding and lively dust jacket but plain cover. In it the end-papers are moved into the book to become the first and last pages. There is a nice listing of morals on 92-3. The morals with the stories are curiously explanatory: "People say such-and-such when they mean...." Here is a standard book that it took me a long time to find the first time!

1954 Choix de Fables. Jean de la Fontaine. La Bibliothéque Précieuse. Paris: Librairie Gründ. 7 F at sidewalk bookseller in Annecy, Sept., '92: purchased by Wendy Wright.

This is your bare-bones LaFontaine! No notes, no editor, no fable numbers (but there are books!), and no introductory material. AI at the rear. Though the book is only selected fables, it seems to cover a lot of ground.

1954 Der Wettlauf zwischen dem Hasen und dem Igel. Ein Märchen der Brüder Grimm. Illustrationen von Otto Schubert. Erste Auflage. Berlin: Der Kinderbuchverlag. DM 18 from Syndikat, Leipzig, July, '95.

I picked this book up largely because of the lovely old hedgehog illustrations, not the least of them showing the mother washing her two very humanlike kids in the bathtub. This version has the hare doing seventy-three laps and then dying during the seventy-fourth! And all the time he could not distinguish between one hedgehog wearing a babushka and one not wearing a babushka!

1954 English Fables and Fairy Stories. Retold by James Reeves. Illustrated by Joan Kiddell-Monroe. First edition. Hardbound. London: Oxford University Press. $15 from Clare Leeper, July, '96.

Here, without a dust-jacket, is a first edition of a book I had found in its third impression from 1956 with a dust-jacket. As I wrote there, I can find none of these nineteen stories that is a fable. There are eight full-page three-tone illustrations to go along with many black-and-white designs along the way. The book is apparently the first in a series, "Oxford Myths and Legends."

1954 Fables de la Fontaine. Illustrations en Couleurs de Henry Blanc. Hardbound. Monte-Carlo: Collection Bleuet N. 31: Éditions Vedette. $10 from John Baxter, Paris, Dec., '04. 

Pictorial boards, the front presenting a collection of Aesopic characters and the back the thirty-five titles that had appeared to date in the Collection Bleuet. AI at the back. The book is 191 pages long and measures a little more than 7" by a little less than 5". Maybe the best of the seven colored illustrations pictures mother goat bidding farewell to her child while the wolf looks on (36). The others are the frontispiece (UP); TMCM (69); TB (100); "Le Chat, la Belette et le petit Lapin" (133); "L'Huitre et les Plaideurs" (164); and "Le Rat qui s'est retiré du Monde" (180). The last of these is a double-page and is also engaging. The art is simple and pleasantly colorful.

1954 Fables de la Fontaine. Illustrated by J. Guyot. Hardbound. Monte-Carlo: Collection Pavillon No. 29: S.A.M. Editions "Vedette". $6.50 from James Gray, Vernouillet, France, through Ebay, Sept., '02. 

As the seller points out, this book is in the style of the "Little Golden Books." It is a sturdy book 6 ¾" x almost 8" with 24 pages. It tells ten of La Fontaine's fables and illustrates them each with about two helpful colored pictures. Among my favorite illustrations are those of the dying laborer in his bed (6), the splay-legged lamb drinking in front of the wolf (8), and Grippeminaud the cat looking out of the corner of his eye at his two unsuspecting victims (17). One finds the illustrator's name only on the back cover's list of illustrators for the whole series of thirty books. This is my second book from Monte-Carlo. The first is a 1956 remake of Julien Macho's work of 1489 from Lyon.

1954 Fables of Aesop. Translated by S.A. Handford with illustrations by Brian Robb. Baltimore: Penguin. British price-lists at back. $1.75 at Bookworks in Chicago, May, '89. Extra copy of the (U.S.?) printing of 1956 for $2 at Gryphon, NY, March, '93.

The sketches are unfortunately rather primitive. The text of the fables is kept quite brief: about a half-page in almost every case. The toughest feature of the book is that stories are listed by their clever titles, and there is no index.

1954 From Long Ago and Many Lands. Stories for Children Told Anew. By Sophia L. Fahs. Illustrated by Cyrus LeRoy Baldridge. Boston: The Beacon Press. See 1948/54.

1954 Happy Times: A Basic First Reader. By Guy L. Bond, Grace A. Dorsey, Marie C. Cuddy, and Kathleen Wise. Hardbound. Printed in California. Sacramento: Developmental Reading Series. A Basic Reading Program. California State Series: California State Department of Education. $4 from Serendipity, Berkeley, Dec., '99?

This is an earlier edition of my 1962 edition published by Lyons and Carnahan. This edition still lists "©1949 Lyons and Carnahan." This first-grade reader includes one fable, "The Donkey and the Dog" (179). This version of the story has some unusual features. A bee talked with the dispirited donkey. Getting into the house was a big part of the donkey's motivation, and he had a first encounter with the man outside that gave him hope that he now might enter. The man handled the situation unusually politically correctly. As I have compared this 1954 version with the 1962 version, I see that the latter will expand on the man's more laconic remarks here: "You are not like the dog, but you are a very good donkey. The dog can not work. He is too small to work. You are big. You help me work in the fields." The donkey went away feeling good and wanting to work for his friend, the man. This version of the story goes on without a "crisis" in which the man needed to call for help. This edition has a simple blue cloth cover with a child holding two dogs on leashes. It lacks the quiz/game that one finds at the end of the later edition. The fable comes eight pages later there.

1954 La Fontaine: Fables. Illustrations de André Jourcin. Hardbound. Paris: Collection Belles Lectures: Éditions Bias. $9.99 from Matterezzi, St. Louis, through eBay, Feb., '02.

This is a standard children's edition of La Fontaine, containing twenty-six fables. The illustrations, all taking just part of page, range from monochrome to duochrome to full color. The best of them might be that showing the escaping thief in "Les Voleurs et l'Ane." Another favorite of mine is FG: the turned-up nose of the fox is perfect!

1954 Poetry. Volume 83, Number 6. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $10 from Turtle Island, Jan., '92.

Reprints three of Marianne Moore's translations of La Fontaine shortly before the appearance of her Viking volume of the complete poems. Poetry had published three earlier in October, 1953. The three here are GGE, DS (misidentified as 6.7 instead of 6.17), and "The Woods and the Woodman." The texts seem to be exactly the same in the two versions.

1954 Schöne Fabeln des Altertums. Äsop/Phädrus/Babrios. Ausgewählt und übertragen von Horst Gasse. Mit zwei Vignetten von Wolfgang Lenck. Sammlung Dieterich, Band 168. Leipzig: Dieterich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung. DM 6 at Historica Antiquariat, Dresden, July, '95.

Compare with the later editions under 1955/84. By contrast this edition has Anmerkungen instead of Erläuterungen and names Horst Gasse as "Dr." in the T of C (100). Though the pagination is the same, the plates are different. This edition also has a different front-cover design. Was the book recopyrighted when it took on two illustrations (apparently one year later)? It seems so, since the later printings list not 1954 but 1955 as the date of the original copyright.

1954 Story Time of My Book House. Edited by Olive Beaupré Miller. Volume 2 of twelve volumes. Chicago: The Book House for Children. See 1937/50/54.

1954 The Beacon Supplementary Readers: Book Three: The Wise Little Goat. Illustrated by Marcia Lane Foster. Sixteenth impression. Pamphlet. Printed in Great Britain. The Beacon Supplementary Readers. London: Ginn and Cmpany Ltd. See 1932/54.

1954 The Animal Story Book. Edited by Ernest Thompson-Seton. (c)1955 by Sarah M. Knapp. Chicago: Auxiliary Educational League. See 1902/38/52/53/54/55.

1954 The Contemporary Mouse: A Fable for Art Lovers. Patricia Barnard. Drawings by Constance Jean Dowling. Photographs by Edward J. Moore of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Dust jacket. NY: Coward-McCann. $4.50 at McIntyre & Moore in Cambridge, July, '88.

Wonderful imagination! Micerinus meets all sorts of friends in the MFA. Photography and drawing are combined nicely. Aesop plays on the edges of this story, especially when Micerinus meets the lions and when the lion and boar face each other. The best fun comes from the terra-cotta fox who's been trying to get a flea out of his ear since the fifth century BC!

1954 The Fables of La Fontaine. Translated by Marianne Moore. Signed numbered first edition (#335 of 400). Hardbound. NY: Viking. $24.95 from Mark Kramer at LCNG Books, Hoosick Falls, NY, through eBay, May, '04. 

I have wanted for a long time to find a signed and numbered first edition of this important book. The red cloth cover has a lovely embossed "LF" emblem. I said when I catalogued the regular first edition of this book years ago that I would like to keep coming back to the book. Well, I have! Moore has been a helpful, if sometimes rather liberal, translator for many of LaFontaine's fables. As I wrote then, this is a huge and lovely book, without illustrations, with an index of titles and first lines in both English and French. I said then that the shorter of La Fontaine's fables might be the most delightful. For example: "The Cock and the Pearl" (31); FG with a fine moral (67); GGE, with a very nicely pointed moral (111); "The Horse and the Ass" (131); and "The Old Cat and the Young Mouse" (284). Many of the pages here are uncut.

1954 The Fables of La Fontaine. Translated by Marianne Moore. NY: Viking Press. First edition. $20 at Kelmscott, Baltimore, Nov., '91. Two extra hardbound copies, one with dust jacket (for $9 from Allen's, Baltimore, May, '92).

A huge and lovely book, without illustrations, with an index of titles and first lines in both English and French. I would like to keep coming back to this book. Most of LaFontaine I find on the longish side, and so I find many of these translations long. But the shorter ones are delightful and usable. For example: "The Cock and the Pearl" (31), FG with a fine moral (67), a Hen that laid golden eggs, with a very nicely pointed moral (111), "The Horse and the Ass" (131), and "The Old Cat and the Young Mouse" (284). The paperback's pagination is identical up to the appendix.

1954 The Fox and the Wolf. A Thirteenth Century Fable. Vincent Torre. #45 of 50. At The Ink-Well Press. $35 by mail from Oak Knoll, Nov., '93.

A very nice piece of work from a well known source. The fable itself seems to be a somewhat rambling conflation of several. The fox has a long and unresolved interchange with the cock before he arrives famished and thirsty at the well, where the water promptly "stinks" to him. Once in the well, he encounters the wolf. The latter descends into the "paradise" the fox has described and ultimately ends up battered by monks. This text uses ¶ instead of paragraph indentations and § instead of quotation marks. The four brown and one black illustrations are nice; they seem to have bled onto the facing pages despite the slip-sheets.

1954 The Story of Reynard the Fox. Translated by Thomas James Arnold from the original German poem Reineke Fuchs by J.W. von Goethe with a new introduction by Edward Lazare and with illustrations engraved on wood by Fritz Eichenberg. NY: The Heritage Press. $12.50 somewhere sometime before '93!

Reading this polished (and slightly archaically translated) poem is different from reading earlier Reynard material. It was a pleasure to read Goethe's poem in English while seeing both Eichenberg's and Kaulbach's (1846/57) illustrations. I like both! Among the fables mentioned in the work are these: FK (5.49), "The Wolf, the Fox, and the Horse" (8 early), "The Horse and the Stag" (10.130), "The Dog and the Ass" (10.155), "The Fox and the Cat" (10.188), WC (10.218), "The Wolf's Liver as a Cure from the Fox" (10.293), LS (10.360), and "The Wolf and the Fox in Buckets" (11.101). One of the great lines comes in Book 8, largely given to the Church, when Badger remarks that Reynard is confessing other people's sins!

1954 The Tortoise and the Hare. By Elizabeth Jenkins. Dust jacket. Hardbound. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd & The Book Society Ltd. $2 from Stephen & Sarah Nunn, Chichester, UK, through eBay, Nov., '02. 

This is a 252-page novel. I have made it so far through the first fifty pages and enjoyed it. It is after World War II in the Berkshires outside London, and a marriage is not going particularly well. In the first fifty pages, I have formed a good sense of the wife, of the man she loves, and of her husband. I am still waiting to find out who is tortoise and who is hare here. I hope to read on! So far I have not noticed a reference to the Aesopic fable.

1954 Uncle Didrick's Stories. Didrick J. Orfield. Illustrated by Marion H. Matchitt. Revised edition. Minneapolis: Minnesota Publishing Company. $6.50 at Biermaier's in Minneapolis, March, '90.

A vintage Minnesota book. Simple, bright pictures with very simple poetry. "The Boys and the Frog" (44) is Aesopic, and there is a touch of Aesop in "The Cocky Rooster" (72). A boy goes to school to learn to speak English (12); a welcome song is put to a Norwegian tune (78).

1954 Zehn Fabeln des Aesop. Haide Kiesel. Paperbound. Essen?, Germany: Folkwang-Offizin. DEM 60 from Buchhandlung am Goethehaus, Frankfurt am Main, July, '95.

Each of the ten fables here has one, two, or three small woodcuts colored in green and black. Most are about 2" square. The best of them include TB, FC, and "Fabel vom Pfau und der Göttin." "Pferd, Rind, Hund und Mensch" has three smaller woodcuts, one for each of the animals from whom humans have a period of their lives. Unusual fables here include "The Man and the Cicada" and "Lycurgos on the Power of Education." Even FS gets a context in a banquet in which philosophers and commoners bore each other with their conversations. Numbered and signed by the artist. This book appears, from the colophon at the book's end, to be a student's work done to close an art apprenticeship. I was very lucky to find this copy.

1954 Wolf in CHEF'S Clothing. The picture cook and drink book for men. Robert H. Loeb, Jr. Illustrated by Jim Newhall. Dust jacket. Chicago: Wilcox & Follett Company. See 1950/54.

1954 50 Fables de La Fontaine. François Ricard. Illustrations Nouvelles de M. Bonamy. Hardbound. Paris: J. De Gigord. $0.01 from Jean-Marc Houle, Ville-Marie, Quebec, through eBay, Sept., '06.

Here is a second copy of a book I was already given in one form. That copy is listed under 1933. It was labeled a sixth edition of the 1933 original. This copy, internally identical, is dated 1954 without apparent reference to earlier printings or editions. The title-page identifies it as "Édition Canadienne." I will repeat some of my comments from there. Here is a lively student textbook from Canada. There are plenty of footnotes with help on difficult vocabulary along the way. After each fable, there is an extended commentary in sections specifically given to the words, the ideas, and the grammar. There are then some questions to answer. From 173 to 184 one finds "Notre Ménagerie," with pictures and descriptions of the birds and animals in the fables. At the end there are three indices to locate fables. The illustrations are livelier than one would expect in a textbook. Notice the dynamic illustration of the eagle, frog, and mouse on 101, for example. In this copy, a student has sketched in a woman to watch this dramatic scene!

1954/56 English Fables and Fairy Stories. Retold by James Reeves. Illustrated by Joan Kiddell-Monroe. Third impression. Dust jacket. London: Oxford University Press. $3 from The Lantern, Washington, D.C., Spring, 1992.

I can find none of these nineteen stories that is a fable. There are eight full-page three-tone illustrations to go along with many black-and-white designs along the way. The book is apparently the first in a series, "Oxford Myths and Legends."

1954/64 Fables of Aesop. Translated by S.A. Handford with illustrations by Brian Robb. New Edition (but note the error that has crept into the Latin heading of Story #96: for expelles we now have expells). Baltimore: Penguin. $.90. Two extra copies.

The text seems otherwise unchanged from the 1954 first printing. There is a new cover. Note that the reference to Rieu on the very first page has changed. This newer book was cheaper than the older one!

1954/64 Fables of Aesop. Translated by S.A. Handford. Illustrations by Brian Robb. Nineteenth printing. Paperbound. NY: Penguin. $4.95 from Clare Leeper, July, '96.

This paperback from Clare Leeper presents a transition between two copies of the Penguin paperback I already had. The simplest way to find the chain of changes is to watch the new retail price marked on the book. My earlier 1954/64 copy had $1.25 on the front-cover. This new nineteenth printing of that edition makes changes to the cover layout and has a price on the back-cover of $4.95. Inflation! The changes to the cover layout include replacing the black background of the front and back covers -- but not of the spine -- with a cream background. The black spine picks up a purple stripe across the top. The next edition in the chain will increase the size of the book from 4¼" x 7" to 5" x 7¾", and the price will go from $4.95 to $5.95. The cover layout will stay the same. The text and illustrations seem unchanged. I do find two interior changes. The very first page no longer makes any reference to Rieu or to the present editors of the series. It offers rather a two-page blurb on Aesop and Handford. Penguin no longer associates itself with Baltimore. The error in #96 remains.

1954/64 The Fables of La Fontaine. Translated by Marianne Moore. NY: Compass Books: Viking Press. First edition. Paperback. $4, June, '87. Extra copy for $8.50 from Calliope Books, San Carlos, CA, through Bibliofind, Oct., '98.

See my comments on the hardbound edition of 1954.

1954/64/91? Fables of Aesop. Translated by S.A. Handford with illustrations by Brian Robb. New Edition (but the error still remains in the Latin heading of Story #96: for expelles we still have expells). London: Penguin. Gift of Robert Heaney from Swindon, Hong Kong, March, '93.

This book is larger than the 1954/64 edition I know in this country. The print itself has grown, and thus this printing is easier to read than earlier printings. This may be a printing restricted from distribution in the U.S. The text seems unchanged from the 1964 printing. The cover illustration here of an Ionian cup in the Louvre reverses the photograph from 1964: the runner is going in the opposite direction. Mention of E.V. Rieu (or any general editor) on the very first page has disappeared completely. Even Swindon's bag mentions Aesop! Of course, it mentions several hundred other people too.

1954/67 12 Fables of Aesop. Linoleum blocks by Antonio Frasconi to illustrate Twelve Fables of Aesop newly narrated by Glenway Wescott and published by the Museum of Modern Art, NY.  Paperbacks of the 1967 Third Printing: signed by Wescott, for $4.95 at Skyline, NY, April, '97; for $2.50 from In and Out of Print Books, San Francisco; and for $2 from Powell's, Portland.

The style is distinctive, but alas I do not find one good illustration (or story for that matter) that I would want to use. People should have a chance to see this book, but so far at least I do not find in it the fantasy or nuance I find in many others.

1954/69 Fables of Aesop. Translated by S.A. Handford with illustrations by Brian Robb. Hammondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. $6 at the Sebastopol Antique Mall, Nov., '98.

This is the only hardbound Penguin edition that I think I have ever seen! It looks from several indications as though it were printed for some country in Asia. It has some Oriental (?) characters on the verso of the title page, and has a chop stamp ("Fitting") on the very first page. The paper is thinner than the paper I am used to in Penguin editions. My, what a person finds! See my comments on the 1954/64 edition. Note the error which I have noted in some earlier editions. The error crept into the Latin heading of Story #96: for expelles we now have expells.

1954? Der Löwe und der Hase: Fabeln von Sergej Michalkow. Nachdichtungen aus dem Russischen von Martin Remané. Ausstattung und Illustrationen von Werner Klemke. Dust jacket. Hardbound. Printed in Germany. Berlin: Alfred Holz Verlag. DEM 12 from Dresdener Antiquariat, Dresden, July, '01. Extra copy without dust jacket for DEM 26 from Antiquariat Richart Kulbach, Heidelberg, July, '96.

Here is another German translation of all but two of the fables one finds in Ausgewählten Fabeln, translated by Bruno Tutenberg and published by Verlag Kultur und Fortschritt in Berlin in 1955. As far as I can tell, only "Eine Einfache Auskunft" and "Solang Man Glück Hat" are there but not here. In many cases, the second translation clears up the fable considerably; in others, I am glad to see my hard-won interpretations confirmed! A T of C at the back lists the twenty fables here. Among the new pieces here are "Die Kleine Schraube" (8), which shows that a little screw can screw up a big wheel; "Die Wassermelone" (27), which shows that the biggest often has nothing but a big outside to offer; "Der Kuckuck und der Star" (37), which demonstrates that there is power in collectivity and a special joy in raising one's own family; and "Der Affe und die Kokosnuß" (43), which suggests, I believe, that there is always something bigger in someone else's yard, and so one had better not be overly proud when one has a particularly large coconut. By comparison with the Tutenberg translation, in "Der Löwe und die Fliege" (13) it is clear here that the fly even takes over the lion's power. "Zwei Hunde" (15) is clearer here than "Polkan und Schawka" there, especially in showing no sympathy for the coward Schawka. Renamé's translation "Die Ratte und die Maus" (17) may see, I think, the difference between local and foreign food differently than Tutenberg's translation. There the sense seems to have been "Whatever prize possessions we bring in from foreign countries--and however much we despise our local artifacts--when it comes to the important act of eating, we choose what is local." Here at least some of the sense seems to be "You cannot get anything tasteful to eat here; you are reduced to bread and bacon." Or is that only the view of the small-minded rat in the fable, while the fabulist sees the irony represented already by Tutenberg's translation? Apparently, it was terrible for the fat fellow from the schwitzbad to be known as a mere major, while the thin fellow was a general (26). Iwan Iwanytsch (33) finds health and life when his high-perks job is taken away from him; now he takes walks with the family he had had no time for earlier. "Der Schneider auf den Lorbeeren" (35) has an even clearer point now: "Applause is not healthy for many people, especially when it is exaggerated." The fable is followed by a tail-piece of a dog with raised leg marking its territory. The tone of Michalkow's work is well given in the epimythium to "Die Vorsichtigen Vögel." In this fable, a bear's abscess is finally broken by a chance bee-sting while doctors keep pushing off decision and adding consultants. Michalkow writes "I write this poem for those who refuse responsibility, but I do not advise you to hope to be saved by bees" (20). "Der Waschbär Hat Sich Sehr Verändert" (29), the fifth new fable here, deals with the surprising change in the racoon once he takes over the ministry for animals' homes; he cannot be found and makes no decisions. Michalkow is pointed in his epimythium: "I wrote this fable, in order to exercise patience, in the waiting room of the Stadtsowjet." The titles are incorporated into pleasing designs for each fable. Most fables also offer tail-pieces.

1954? Der Wettlauf zwischen dem Hasen und dem Igel. Frei nach einer alten Fabel von Maria Massa Georgi; Als Singspiel bearbeitet von Helmut Sadler. Zeichnungen von Lilo Jacob-Roscher. Pamphlet. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag. DM 30 from Antiquariat Richart Kulbach, Heidelberg, June, '95. 

That this is a popular story is attested to by the fact that this is the second independent publication of it I have found. The other, from 1954, has the same title and was done by the Kinderbuchverlag in East Berlin. Like that work, this one has lively hedgehog illustrations. Here they remind one of Steiff's great hedgehog characters. Neither the text nor the illustrations run into the problems caused in the other version by allowing the wife hedgehog wife to wear a distinguishing babushka when she is supposed to look exactly like her husband! In fact, a particular picture is given on the upper right of 3 to show how alike the two are. The strategy of the race is clear to the reader from the start in this version, and the repeated hedgehog-line has its effect: "Ich bin schon da!" In this version the hare does seventy-four laps, and then "his pride brings him death." Apparently Sadler's musical version first appeared in a publication from the Mannheim Musikverlag.

1954? Fables de la Fontaine, 4me Série N°1. Paperbound. Epinal: Imagerie Pellerin à Épinal. €22.5 from Chez Libraires Associés, Clignancourt, June, '07.

Here is a third version of the same work and, by all indications, the earliest. I have it as done in 1978 and 1982. Though this copy bears no date, someone has handwritten in pencil "5-8-55 135 fr. A Wetterwald." I take it that this is perhaps a 1954 edition or thereabouts. This edition has a yellow paper cover featuring the rooster and the fox. The same illustration appears again on 17. The mention of a "4me Série" is new, though the "#1" fits with the other two versions. (I have the 1982 but not the 1978 version of #2.) The best-colored illustrations in this set include the cover illustration, WL (2), "Les Voleurs et l'Ane" (10), and "Le Cerf se voyant dans l'Eau" (23). I will include several comments I made about the later volumes. This 32-page booklet offers seventeen well-chosen fables of La Fontaine. The first fable, GA, is illustrated with a black-and-white tableau; the last, "La Guenon, le Singe & la Noix," has an inky black-and-white illustration. The fifteen in between have each a strong full-page colored illustration typical of Epinal work, with large areas of bright simple colors. I take it that these are all reprints by Epinal of an earlier work of its own.

1954? Fables de la Fontaine, 4me Série N°2. Paperbound. Epinal: 4me Série N°1: Imagerie Pellerin à Épinal. €22.50 from Chez Libraires Associés, Clignancourt, June, '07.

Here is a second version of the same work and, by all indications, the earlier. I have it as done in 1982. (I also have the first copy of "No 1" for both times, and the "No 1" of a 1978 printing.) Though this copy bears no date, someone has handwritten in pencil "5-8-55 135 fr. A Wetterwald." I take it that this is perhaps a 1954 edition or thereabouts. This edition has a yellow paper cover featuring the goat and the fox. The same illustration appears again on 6. The mention of a "4me Série" is new, though the "#2" fits with the other version. The best-colored illustrations in this set include the cover illustration, "Le Corbeau Voulant Imiter l'Aigle" (17), "Le Lion Malade et le Renard" (21), and "L'Oiseleur, l'Autour & l'Alouette" (31). This 32-page booklet offers seventeen well-chosen fables of La Fontaine. Again two black-and-white illustrations bracket fifteen full-page colored illustrations. The special attraction of Pellerin illustrations has something to do, I believe, with large areas of strong, bright, simple colors. I take it that these are all reprints by Epinal of an earlier work of its own.

1954? La Fontaine: Fables Choisies II. Livres 7-12. Adrien Cart et Mademoiselle G. Fournier. Paris: Classiques Larousse. $5 at Adams Avenue Book Store, Aug., '93.

A typical pamphlet for French secondary students. There are no illustrations except for the frontispiece. Does not contain all the fables of the first six books. Did Larousse start with these pamphlets (perhaps after the war?) and then grow into larger paperbacks with pictures?