I Love to Read Faerie Tales
When I was a child, I grew up listening to my maternal grandmother reading faerie tales to me from a big (at least from a child's perspective) green leather bound volume of Grimm's Faerie Tales with fine gilding and marbled edges. It had numerous colour plates. The book had been hers as a child, and her mother's before her, dating it to the 1880s. It was through this experience that I learned to love two things: traditional faerie tales complete with all the wonderful symbolism and gruesomeness that those original non-Disney versions contain, and beautiful book illustrations from the Golden Age of Children’s Illustration before the Second World War.
The theme for “Smile on Saturday” for the 24th of September is “I love to…” where the requirement is to take a picture of something I love to do. As soon as I read the theme, I knew what I wanted to do. I’m not a child anymore, and many of the faerie tales I heard as a child sitting on my grandmother’s knee I now know by heart, yet I still love reading faerie tales. In addition to that, as an adult, I also love collecting antiquarian volumes of faerie tales illustrated by the old master illustrators so I can admire the imagery of faerie tales from a pre-Disney era. Thus my choice for this week’s theme, which I hope you like, and also hope makes you smile.
The book I have sitting in my lap is one of the first I ever bought as a teenager, when I first began to collect antiquarian volumes of faerie tales seriously. “Cinderella’s Picture Book”, published in 1873, features three faerie tales: Cinderella, Puss in Boots and Valentine and Orson and is full of brightly coloured illustrations by English artist and book illustrator, Walter Crane (1845 – 1915). Walter Crane is considered to be the most influential, and among the most prolific, children's book creators of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of English children's illustrated literature would exhibit in its developmental stages in the later Nineteenth Century. Engraved and printed by Edmund Evans, the stories are paginated separately: each eight pages illustrated in colour, printed on one side only. Commissioned for John Lane of The Bodley Head, this volume was not printed en masse, making it something of a rarity even amongst antiquarian books.
I Love to Read Faerie Tales
When I was a child, I grew up listening to my maternal grandmother reading faerie tales to me from a big (at least from a child's perspective) green leather bound volume of Grimm's Faerie Tales with fine gilding and marbled edges. It had numerous colour plates. The book had been hers as a child, and her mother's before her, dating it to the 1880s. It was through this experience that I learned to love two things: traditional faerie tales complete with all the wonderful symbolism and gruesomeness that those original non-Disney versions contain, and beautiful book illustrations from the Golden Age of Children’s Illustration before the Second World War.
The theme for “Smile on Saturday” for the 24th of September is “I love to…” where the requirement is to take a picture of something I love to do. As soon as I read the theme, I knew what I wanted to do. I’m not a child anymore, and many of the faerie tales I heard as a child sitting on my grandmother’s knee I now know by heart, yet I still love reading faerie tales. In addition to that, as an adult, I also love collecting antiquarian volumes of faerie tales illustrated by the old master illustrators so I can admire the imagery of faerie tales from a pre-Disney era. Thus my choice for this week’s theme, which I hope you like, and also hope makes you smile.
The book I have sitting in my lap is one of the first I ever bought as a teenager, when I first began to collect antiquarian volumes of faerie tales seriously. “Cinderella’s Picture Book”, published in 1873, features three faerie tales: Cinderella, Puss in Boots and Valentine and Orson and is full of brightly coloured illustrations by English artist and book illustrator, Walter Crane (1845 – 1915). Walter Crane is considered to be the most influential, and among the most prolific, children's book creators of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of English children's illustrated literature would exhibit in its developmental stages in the later Nineteenth Century. Engraved and printed by Edmund Evans, the stories are paginated separately: each eight pages illustrated in colour, printed on one side only. Commissioned for John Lane of The Bodley Head, this volume was not printed en masse, making it something of a rarity even amongst antiquarian books.