Creighton University

• Fables Home
• Introduction & Orientation
• Books of Fables
  • Individual Books
  • Series Books
  • Search
• Aesop's Artifacts
• Fable Research Resources
• Links - more on Fables
• Fables - Video
• Contact Me

Aesop's Fables > Books of Fables > Individual Books > 2010 to 2014

• 2010
• 2011
• 2012

2010 Aesop Naturaliz'd: in a collection of fables and stories from Aesop, Locman, Pilpay, and others.  The fifth edition, with the addition of above fifty new fables.  Paperbound.  London/La Vergne, TN: D. Midwinter and A. Ward/Ecco Print Editions.  See 1743/2010.

2010 Aesop's Fables. Charles Santore. First printing. Dust-jacket. Hardbound. NY: Sterling Children's Books. Gift of Jeanette Hilton, Oct., '12.

Here is a redoing of the 1988 version, of which I have a signed copy. This version is almost 2" shorter and 1" narrower. The dust-jacket now features the finish of TH rather than FG. Inside the book there is still the triple foldout of the end of the TH race. In fact, the animals from all the fables again reappear in this foldout. Now a moral is added to each fable. "Ass" in that version has become "Donkey" in this version. As I wrote then, this is lovely, lively book. The art is big, witty, and strong. As the verso of the title-page indicates, this special edition was printed for Kohl's Department Stores on behalf of Kohl's Cares. The back-cover notes Kohl's and the exceptional price of $5. 

2010 Aesop's Fables. Retold by Fiona Waters. Fulvio Testa. Signed by both Waters and Testa. First Printing. Dust-jacket. Hardbound. London: Andersen Press. £30 from Anderida Books, Ledbury, Herefordshire, UK, Dec., '10.

Fiona Waters, I am learning, is a prominent creator of children's books; she has produced some eight of them! She and Fulvio Testa have combined to make a very good fable book here. Testa's style remains similar to the style he showed in his 1989 Barron edition encompassing twenty fables. Here he has tripled the number of fables. The inspiration of some scenes remains the same. The illustrations there were branded by the unusual multi-colored borders. Here the illustrations take up the whole of each right-hand page, while texts are on the left-hand pages. The sleeping hare there had been playing solitaire. Now he is on an ipod (title-page and 31)! WC there and here are the same in inspiration, but the venue has changed (11). The cover-page and dust-jacket have a fine FC, which can also be found on 14. There is real distance between these two characters! FS (29) may have improved. "The Tortoise and the Eagle" (33) is a fine illustration; it gives us a sense of the proud tortoise's smallness. I love the cat hanging with one eye open and fixed on the mouse under the dresser (35). DLS is told twice to accommodate two different versions (38-41). "The Lion, the Bear and the Fox" (86) does a good job of showing the large beasts' exhaustion. This version substitutes a trap of sticks for the hunter's bow in AD (74). The telling of some fables might make them seem banal; an example is "The Hunting Dog, the Lion and the Fox" (72). There is a small head-piece for each text besides the full-page illustration. The two illustrations often work together well. A good example is FWT (84): the headpiece illustrates the trap and the severed tail. The full-page illustration shows the fox without a tail trying to persuade the other foxes to get rid of their tails too.

2010 Aesop's Fables. Hardbound. New Delhi: Tell Me a Story: Pegasus B. Jain. $7 from an unknown source, August, '11.

This hardbound book of 82 pages seems to be a compendium in smaller format of the stories contained in the set of Pegasus B. Jain paperbacks I have gathered elsewhere. It thus contains twenty stories of four pages each, each illustrated with lively computer-designed graphics. The early T of C closes with a blooper: "Check You Memory." The element itself at the end of the book has it right by adding a letter to the middle word.

2010 Aesop's Fables. J.B. Rundell. With Illustrations by Ernest Griset. Second printing. Dust-jacket. Hardbound. NY: Fall River Press: Sterling Publishing. $10.98 from Barnes and Noble, Omaha, Dec., '11.

Here is a casual find from a Christmas shopping visit to Barnes and Noble. It seems to select from the enlarged versions of Rundell and Griset's work that appeared starting in about 1874, even though the only references here are to the original smaller work of this pair in 1869. From what I can gather, there is more here than was in the earlier work and less than was in the enlarged editions beginning about 1874. The clearest sign of the presence of the enlarged version here is the final "Finis" illustration (250). The clearest sign that some of the early work is missing is the lack here of "The Ant and the Chrysalis." Many of Griset's illustrations in the original publications are dark, particularly in cheaper later printings. The advantage of this book is that those illustrations are sharp and clear here. Griset's work is still often dark in itself, as in "The Frog and the Fox" (118) and "The Fir Tree and the Bramble" (147). Griset remains whimsical. Why, for example, is the knight asking his horse to return to battle Don Quixote (95)? Why is the thief pictured as an Eskimo but not mentioned as such (132)? Why is the nurse threatening to throw her child to the wolf a monkey (155)? I still have questions about why the travelers run into a bear and a cub (36) and why there are three foxes in the illustration but only one in the text of FG (73). Griset works in several styles, one of which reminds me of the figures one sees in German beer halls, as on the T of C page and on 109. Other styles include those heavy on shadow, like WC on VII and again on 24; those that are cartoonlike, like "The Eagle, the Cat, and the Sow" on 22 and "The Fox and the Mask" on 39; and the more straightforward, like "The Cat and the Cock" on 49. Overall, I am delighted to see this classic reproduced and available economically. To find Rundell, by the way, one has to dig into the introduction. There is an AI at the end and a list of full-page illustrations on VI.

2010 Aesop's Fables: A Modern Adaptation. By L.B. Glisson. Texts mainly after Croxall, La Fontaine, L'Estrange, et al. Classically Illustrated by Ernest Griset. Paperbound. Gainesville, FL: Doberwarez Multimedia. $12.98 from Better World Books, April, '11.

"160 timeless lessons in ethics, critical thinking, and common sense with more than 150 artful illustrations." This book's greatest feature may be the beautiful colored version of Griset's cover. It takes a full set of his illustrations and puts them to standard prose texts. The Griset illustrations have all their usual variations, including the very dark inkings (e.g., "The Hermit and the Bear on 178); the exotic settings in which an eskimo thief tries to distract a dog (95); the nicely delineated ("The Bear and the Beehives" on 65 and the back cover); and the classic (e.g., WC on 19). There is a T of C on 183-6. Is this another "print upon demand" book? It was printed in La Vergne, TN, on April 4, 2011. Here is commercialism at work in a new area. I am tiring of people selling me contemporary copies of old books as though they were something different from that. 

2010 Aesop's Fables (Armenian). Aesop. Paperbound. Yerevan, Armenia: Publishing House Nerashkharh. $15.50 from ArmeniaBooks.com through eBay, May, '12.

According to an eBay seller, the booklet was published in a very limited edition. To guess from the format of other typical books of Aesop's fables, there is some introductory material about Greece and the life of Aesop, starting on 3. By 35, we are dealing with FC, as the simple black-and-white illustration indicates. Further fable-identifying illustrations include WL (44), LM (48), TMCM (53), "The Lion and the Fox" (60), "The Hare and the Lion" (62), and FG (68). This booklet is my sixth or seventh publication in Armenian in the collection. ISBN 978-9939-817-05-7. 72 pages. I was able to get some helpful basic information on the book by tracking its ISBN number. 

2010 Aesop's Fables: Complete, Original Translation from Greek. Translated from the Greek by George Fyler Townsend. Paperbound. Lexington, KY: Forgottenbooks.com. See 2007/10.

2010 Aesop's Fables in English & Latin, Interlineary, for the Benefit of those who not having a Master, Would Learn Either of these Tongues.  (John Locke).  Paperbound.  London/LaVergne, TN: A.and J. Churchil.  See 1703/2010.

2010 Aesop's Fables with Instructive Morals and Reflections, abstracted from all party considerations, adapted to all capacities: and design'd to promote religion, morality, and universal benevolence. Samuel Richardson. Paperbound. London/La Vergne, TN: Eighteenth Century Collections Online Print Editions: J. Osborn, Junior/Gale Ecco. See 1740/2010.

2010 Aesop's Fables: 240 Short Stories for Children. Illustrated by Harrison Weir, John Tenniel, Ernest Griset and Others. Paperbound. Lexington, KY: Petra Books. $8.94 from Amazon.com, Feb., '10.

This is a curious paperbound book of the internet instantaneous publishing era. My Amazon order is dated February 20, 2010. This book was printed February 21, 2010. The book is based on Aesop's Fables: A New Revised Version From Original Sources, With Upwards of 200 Illustrations by Harrison Weir, John Tenniel, Ernest Griset and Others, e.g. from Syndicate Trading Company and William Allison Company in the 1880's. It falls thus into a tradition of already cheap offprints. This book actually presents on 15 a second title-page generated from that book, acknowledging Frank F. Lovell & Company as the publisher in New York. That second title-page -- with a different title from the book's title! -- follows a beginning T of C and is followed in turn by a life of Aesop. It is a service to make these texts and illustrations available, I suppose, but I am saddened at the quality of the illustrations as they go through a third or fourth generation. Consider, for example, the Gustave Doré illustration of the fisherman on 57. Doré could not be happy to see his work presented this way! The second DS illustration (96) suffers the same fate. The very cover is a pixillated bleeding misrepresentation of Milo Winter's lovely FC. Progess!

2010 After Aesop: Improvisations on Aesop's Fables. Steven Carter. Paperbound. Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. AU$60.99 from The Nile, Australia, through eBay, April, '10.

True to the character of this book, I will say that it provides me a learning experience. First, I bought the book from an Australian dealer because I could not find it here in the USA. Now I see that Amazon is selling it for $33.99. I paid almost twice that! Amazon lists its beginning date in September of 2010, five months after I bought it. My second realization is that this is a book I could have written! Carter consulted the editions by Temple, Gibbs, and Townsend. Then he created these improvisations. For most of the fables, the procedure seems the same. He tells the fable in traditional fashion and then assigns a witty moral. The one page of introductory material consists of two excerpts from Wikipedia. The fables are one to a page for 226 pages. There is no T of C or AI. Here are a few samples. "The pregnant woman and the bed" (5) is told in traditional fashion, including the climactic line "My dear, it hardly makes sense that my suffering should end in the very place where it was conceived!" Carter's addition: "Just because you make your bed doesn't mean you have to lie in it." CJ is told in traditional fashion with this following comment: "Pearls before swine are one thing, pearls before roosters quite another" (7). "The man with two mistresses" gets this: ".And both mistresses loved him all the more, for everyone knows bald men are more virile than men with hair" (35). I do notice that some narratives are themselves changed. The bear says that he loves people and thus never eats human carrion and the fox asks why he then kills living people (49). "'You know,' replies the bear, 'I never looked at it that way!'" It is good to see someone having fun with Aesop this way. My last question is: was this book perhaps printed on demand?

2011 Das Grosse Fabelbuch. Constanze Breckoff. Illustriert von Gerhard Glück. Hardbound. Oldenburg: Lappan Verlag. €18.65 from Amazon.de, August, '12.

This is one of several books I saw for sale in Germany, but my suitcases were already too full, and so I waited and ordered them here in the USA as soon as I got back. This book surprises. It seems another in the long list of standard children's fable books, but on examination both the texts and the illustrations are exceptional. The well chosen texts represent a wide variety of sources. One or two texts may not be fables. There are over one hundred well told stories here. The full-page colored illustrations in this large-format book are engaging. Those particularly well done include LM (21); "Warum Hund und Katze Feinde sind" (35); "Der Wolf als Schäfer" (58); and DW (79). A special treat comes in the two-page spreads of illustration, e.g., for "The Blue Jackal" (82-83) and "The Fox and the Lion" (136-37). I did not know "The Flying Fox" (142); do not miss the great illustration! The cover illustration shows the bear reading to the fox and crow, while the goose and rabbit look on from a little more distance. I am glad to have found this very nice book! 

2010 Fables (Spine: Aesop's Fables). Editor responsible: Alberto Briceño. Illustration: Franco Martinez Luis. Hardbound. Lima, Peru: Los Libros Más Pequeños del Mundo. $6.99 from USAMiniBooks through eBay, April, '11.

This may be the most engaging miniature fable book I have seen. Every page involves some color, and there are 435 pages. Some ninety-two fables are listed in the closing T of C. Every fable gets a two-page spread for its main illustration; only the last story, TH, seems not to get one of these spreads. One of the most engaging of these also occurs on the back cover: the fox lounges in the well as though on a raft in a swimming pool, while the goat looks down in envy (24-25). Good WC on 68-69! Enjoy the fly ready to die on 152-53. The visual artist on 198-99 specifies as the tail the part of the beaver that the beaver cuts off when he can no longer outrun his pursuers. This translation may also have been done by a non-English speaker: "when he is discovered and chased to cut him the parts.." Good DS on 272-73. This little book shows its colorful nature on the edges of its pages before one even opens it. It has a ribbed outer spine and ribbon bookmarker. It seems to be the second fable book I have found that was printed in Peru. 

2010 Fables d'Esope en Quatraines dont Il y en a une Partie au Labyrinthe de Versailles. (Isaac) Benserade.  Illustrations by Pierre le Sueur I.  Paperbound.  Paris/La Vergne, TN: Sebastien Mabre-Cramoisy/Kessinger Publishing.  See 1678/2010.

2010 Fables de Jean de La Fontaine Lues par Gérard Philipe et ses Compères. Illustrations by Bruno Vacaro. Hardbound. Vandrezanne: Le Chant du Monde. €19.90 from L'Écume des Pages, Paris, July, '12.

This is a fine book with an excellent compact disc. Twenty fables appear, with at least one fine, detailed, full-page colored illustration per fable. The best among these illustrations may be for "The Coach and the Fly" (5), as the mosquito stands sweating after the coach can start downhill; for "The Small Fish and the Angler" (11); for GA (21); for "The Wolves and the Sheep" (32), where wolf and sheep bump fists to clinch their deal; and for OF (34). The illustrations are lively. There is a T of C on the back cover. The actors on the disc come from Le Théâtre Français. The tracks feature only voices, but they are excellent and nicely varied voices. The French keep on presenting their La Fontaine with distinction! 

2010 Fables du Pere Desbillons, Traduites in François par le Même, avec le Latin à coté, corrigé de nouveau, Vol. I.  (François-Joseph) Desbillons.  Paperbound.  Strasbourg/Liege/La Vergne, TN: Chez Anne-Catherine Bassompierre/ Kessinger Publishing.  See 1779/2010.

2010 Fables from Aesop and Myths from Palaephatus with a vocabulary.  By John T. White.  Paperbound.  London/La Vergne, TN: White's Grammar School Texts:  Longmans, Green, and Co./Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprints.  See 1876/2010.

2010 Fables from Africa. Timothy Knapman. Illustrated by Linda Selby and Hannah Firmin. Paperbound. Oxford: Tree Tops: Oxford University Press. $11.73 from Superbookdeals through Better World Books, April, '12.

This is a nice reader with five African fables. I do not know any of these fables, at least in this form. Their storylines follow standard fable tropes. "The Tortoise and the Baboon" is like FS. After the baboon mocks the tortoise by inviting him to enjoy food up a tree, tortoise invites baboon to wonderful food but insists that he have clean paws. Baboon must come over ashen territory, and so repeated attempts do not produce clean paws. "The Upside-down Lion" works off of the pattern of getting the dangerous animal back to the trap he fell into the first time. This time lion learns not to threaten friendly people, and so he acts better to his liberating mouse than he had to his liberating baboons. "The Hungry Hyena" sees a hyena lured into a corral by a wily jackal. After they eat many lambs, the jackal goes against his own rule not to attack goats. When the goats rouse the dogs and shepherds, the jackal departs through a hole. The hyena can no longer make it through and pays the penalty for all the shepherds' loss. "The Bag of Salt" has a lizard jump onto and claim a bag of salt which a tortoise is dragging home. In revenge, the tortoise jumps onto and claims the lizard! "Stronger than the Lion" has to do with tricking a lion into a locked hut, where he learns that hunger is stronger than he is. Try 28 through 31 for two of the best illustrations showing the bloated hyena first loose and then stuck in the corral wall. Good stuff!

2010 Fables from Africa. Timothy Knapman. Illustrated by Linda Selby and Hannah Firmin. Apparent seventh printing. Paperbound. Oxford: Tree Tops: Oxford University Press. £6.13 from AwesomeBooks.com, June, '12.

Here is the seventh printing of this nice reader with five African fables. I do not know any of these fables, at least in this form. Their storylines follow standard fable tropes. "The Tortoise and the Baboon" is like FS. After the baboon mocks the tortoise by inviting him to enjoy food up a tree, tortoise invites baboon to wonderful food but insists that he have clean paws. Baboon must come over ashen territory, and so repeated attempts do not produce clean paws. "The Upside-down Lion" works off of the pattern of getting the dangerous animal back to the trap he fell into the first time. This time lion learns not to threaten friendly people, and so he acts better to his liberating mouse than he had to his liberating baboons. "The Hungry Hyena" sees a hyena lured into a corral by a wily jackal. After they eat many lambs, the jackal goes against his own rule not to attack goats. When the goats rouse the dogs and shepherds, the jackal departs through a hole. The hyena can no longer make it through and pays the penalty for all the shepherds' loss. "The Bag of Salt" has a lizard jump onto and claim a bag of salt which a tortoise is dragging home. In revenge, the tortoise jumps onto and claims the lizard! "Stronger than the Lion" has to do with tricking a lion into a locked hut, where he learns that hunger is stronger than he is. Try 28 through 31 for two of the best illustrations showing the bloated hyena first loose and then stuck in the corral wall. Good stuff! 

2010 Fables Impertinentes. Jean de La Fontaine. Dessins de Yak Rivais. Paperbound. Paris: Éditions Retz. €14.50 from Amazon.fr, Nov., '10.

One of a cycle of books produced by Retz as "impertinentes." Each fable's retelling plays some game, like GA's substitution and multiple placement of "pitit" all over the fable, as in this line "'I was singing,' replied the little beast who had not raised the littlest finger to raise the littlest provision for winter" (9). This telling of FC avoids the letter "e." TMCM includes a generous admixture of franglais (15). OR turns into a "calligram," in which print forms a picture of what is being reported. Do not miss the good calligram of "The Fox and the Wolf" on 105. "The Lion and the Mosquito" is filled with interjections (21). The opening T of C lists the shift or game at work in each fable between its title and page number. This is good fun. It is great to see a published book having fun with good literature this way. The illustrations are lively cartoons, often substituting human characters for the fables' animals. A masterpiece is BF (44), where feathers protrude from all sorts of human orifices! I find haunting the late representation of FC in which La Fontaine is the crow and the king is the fox (122). Hmmm! It is a shame that the cartoons are black-and-white and not colored!

2010 Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks: Illustrated Edition. Translated by W.T. Larned. Illustrated by John Rae. Paperbound. Chicago/Gloucester, UK: P.F. Volland/Dodo Press. AUD$17.99 from The Nile, Australia, Sept., '10.

Here is a "print upon demand" black-and-white reprint of Larned and Rae's book originally published by Volland in 1918. Like the original, it has eighteen fables, each done with four excellent, witty pictures. The illustrations follow a pattern: opener, comment, full-page display, and "epigram." Here the full-page illustrations are reduced to the size of the other illustrations. All of these are so delightful in color in the original that it is a rather negative experience to see them here in black-and-white. See my comments on the original from 1918 and later printings from 1924 and 1950. Since the book has changed its character, I list it simply as a new publication under 2010. 

2010 Fables in Verse: From Aesop, La Fontaine, and Others.  Mary Anne Davis, H(enry) Corbould, and George James Corbould.  Paperbound.  London/La Vergne, TN: A.K. Newman Co./General Books.  See 1822/2010.

2010 Fábulas de Esopo. Ruth Rocha. Ilustraçoes Jean-Claude R. Alphen. Paperbound. Sao Paolo: Conte um Conto: Editora Salamandra. Gift of Loide Nascimento de Souza, April, '11.

Loide Nascimento de Souza recently submitted her dissertation on the presence of fable in Monteiro Lobato's books at the State University of Sao Paolo. She had written to me asking if I could obtain for her a copy of Perry's important essay on fable. I did, and she has thanked me with this lovely gift! Ruth Rocha, she tells me, is one of the "heirs" of Monteiro Lobato and among the prominent authors of children's literature in Brazil. This is a lovely and lively paperback volume of some 48 pages. The major illustrations here are full-page dramatic presentations. Besides the full-page illustrations, there are clever designs added to many of the text pages. In the first full-page illustration, the fox shows to the rooster up on a perch a "Decreto" about the supposed universal peace. FG (10) shows the frustration of the fox as his paws scratch in the air near the grapes. DS (17) does an unusually good job of mirroring the dog by using a color contrast of blue and brown. One illustration after another is a delight! The grasshopper is huge by comparison with the ant (33). We see the oak suspended in mid air while the reed bends (38); the little design shows the reed's hat blowing off. A delightful book!

2010 Fábulas Magicas. Hardbound. Madrid: mi cajita de música: Editorial Libsa. $14.69 from Book Lovers USA through abe, Nov., '11.

The special feature of this book is that it contains a music box: "Gira la manivela y escucha" is written around the semi-circle cut out of the opening side of the book, and inside this cut out portion is a crank to turn the music box. Eleven fables are narrated on thick pages, two pages to a fable. They contain standard popular Aesopic fables: BC; GA; "The Swan and the Crow"; FG; TMCM; BW; MM; DS; "The Cherry"; and "El Mate." "The Cherry" involves a boy eating cherries and mocking an old man who plants cherries; he comes back years later to find a large fruit-bearing cherry tree and repents his foolish insults. "El Mate" tells of God's gift of mate to human beings, apparently to console them over the loss of their children. Strangely, LM is pictured on the front of this book but does not appear in the inside! Something went wrong perhaps between artist and edidtor.. The tune played by the music box is "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

2010 Fractured Fables: May, 2010. Edited by Jim Valentino and Kristen K. Simon. Book design and graphics by Jim Valentino. Free comic book day edition. Paperbound. Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, Inc.. $1 from Traders of Babylon, Hoboken, NJ, through eBay, July, '10.

After resisting buying this comic book for a long time, I spent $1 to put it in the collection and settle the issue! The five stories here are indeed not fables: "Red Riding Hood," Rumplestiltskin," "The Real Princess," "Raponsel," and "Hey Diddle, Diddle." They are written and illustrated by various people. In "Red Riding Hood," it turns out that "Grandma's" is a "Martial Arts School for Young Ladies." The wolf hardly knows what hits him! Raponsel lets down her hare instead of her hair. The T of C and the story title have "Raponsel." I had already written it up here as a typo; it turns out that there is a "Rapunzel" and a "Raponsel." The parodies here are fun if somewhat brainless. It turns out that there is a 160-page hardcover titled Fractured Fables by Bill Willingham. 

2010 Francisci-Josephi Desbillons Fabulae Aesopiae, Curis Posterioribus Omnes Fere Emendatae: Quibus Accesserunt Plus Quam CLXX Novae. Franciscus-Josephus Desbillons. Editio sexta. Paperbound. Paris/La Vergne, TN: J. Barbou/Nabu Reprints. See 1778/2010.

2010 I.A. Krilov: Basni. Illustrations by Dom Mescerjakova. Paperbound. Moscow: Detscar Klassika: Detscar. $10 from A. Leontiev , Moscow, through eBay, August, '11.

This is a classy large-format pamphlet of 32 unnumbered pages, unusually tall: almost 11½" with a width of 7¾". It shows the recent improvement in quality of Russian publications. Its front cover offers a slick illustration of a rat and a mouse looking upwards in pleasant green and orange colors. Inside one finds a two-page spread for each of thirteen fables with simple illustrations in green and black. Twelve of the thirteen represent Krilov favorites that seem to reappear in publication after publication: FC; "Monkey and Mirror"; "Elephant and Pug"; "Quartet"; "Crane, Lobster, and Pike"; GA; FG; "Monkey and Spectacles"; "Sow and Crow"; "Cock and Cuckoo"; "Bullfinch and Pigeon"; and WC. New to me and delightful is "Mouse and Rat": the rat, because she fears the cat so thoroughly, figures that the cat will defeat the lion. "If I the rat am so afraid of him, the lion must have to fear him too" is the illogic that Krylov here ridicules. Perhaps best of the illustrations is "Crane, Lobster, and Pike"; it places the three well apart from each other on the two-page spread and thus underscores the point of the fable. The lobster has eight lines to eight different legs.

2010 Jean de La Fontaine: Les Plus Belles Fables. Illustrations de Philippe Salembier. Hardbound. Chevron, Belgium: Éditions Hemma. €11.66 from amazon.fr, Oct., '11.

This is the latest in a long line of pretty illustrated French editions of fables for children. Contemporary technology and artistic ability combine for pictures that are colorful and exact. It all starts with a cover that offers a beautiful rendition of FS painted onto its soft cushion. Forty fables receive one-to-three fine illustrations each. Some are more childlike in their approach, like TH (9-11), which offers humanly clad figures. One of my favorites is "The Stag and the Pool" (20-21); this illustration spreads beautifully across two pages. In "The Lion Become Old" (40-41), the ass is climbing onto the lion's body to deliver his insulting blow. AD has a whimsical illustration in which the ant is riding like a horseback rider on the dove (45). In a curious surprise, the book's illustration of FS (55) dresses the animals who had no human dress in the same scene on the book's cover! Does the illustration on 71 belong to the preceding fable, "The Lion and the Mosquito," or to the present fable, "The Spider and the Swallow"? Another favorite of mine shows the weasel and rabbit pleading all sorts of logic before the bespectacled cat (88). Little do they realize that they are both about to get eaten! Let me mention two last favorites. A two-page spread suggests the maliciousness of the frog in FM as he is about to plunge the rat into the water (114-15); the final page shows the scene from above as the hawk carries both away. My impression is that Salembier has borrowed heavily from French illustration history and used other people's framing of scenes as she has created her own realization within that framing.

2010 Jean de La Fontaine's Fables, Volume I. Translated by Elizur Wright. Illustrations by Gustave Doré. Paperbound. Miyun: Tsinghua University Press. 79 Yuan from Hangzhou Wholesale City Trading Co., Oct., '10.

Here is a two-volume presentation in English of Elizur Wright's translation of the full collection of La Fontaine's fables. This first volume contains -- somewhat unusually -- Books I through VII. Brown monochrome presentations of Gustave Doré's full-page illustrations are interspersed liberally through the text. As is frequent in present-day Chinese paperbacks, text-page foredges are decorated with an identical repeating pattern and the covers are heavy paper folded back to create a flap. Be careful: the T of C at the beginning of either volume is identical. A buyer like me can easily think that there are two copies of Volume I rather than one copy each of both volumes. As page 1 makes clear, this is Part I, and Book I starts on 3. This is a substantial production. There is a table of some sort on the book's last five pages, following 384. 

2010 Jean de La Fontaine's Fables, Volume II. Translated by Elizur Wright. Gustave Doré. Paperbound. Miyun: Tsinghua University Press. 79 Yuan from Hangzhou Wholesale City Trading Co., Oct., '10.

Here is a two-volume presentation in English of Elizur Wright's translation of the full collection of La Fontaine's fables. This second volume contains -- somewhat unusually -- Books VIII through XII. Brown monochrome presentations of Gustave Doré's full-page illustrations are interspersed liberally through the text. As is frequent in present-day Chinese paperbacks, text-page foredges are decorated with an identical repeating pattern and the covers are heavy paper folded back to create a flap. Be careful: the T of C at the beginning of either volume is identical. A buyer like me can easily think that there are two copies of Volume I rather than one copy each of both volumes. As page 385 makes clear, this is Part 2, and Book VIII starts on 387. This is a substantial production. There is a table of some sort on the book's last seven pages, following 717. 

2010 La Fontaine aux fables: Trente-six fables de La Fontaine interprétées en bande dessinée: Texte Intégral. Various artists. First edition. Hardbound. Paris: Guy Delcourt Productions. €17.92 from amazon.fr, Nov., '10.

This volume puts together the three separate volumes published in 2002, 2004, and 2006, each containing twelve fables. As I mentioned there, this is a high-class volume of comics. The curious endpapers of the first two shorter editions have been replaced with plain maroon. The artist for each fable can be found in the T of C at the back; few seem to have more than one fable represented here. The fables here probe dimensions not perceived in the text, as when the wolf first makes various attempts on the sheep, only to be thwarted by a dog, and then tries on various disguises before settling on that of a shepherd (3). The stories themselves last generally about three or four pages with about eleven or twelve individual pictures on a page. I find the artists here clever. Two of them bring in FC as clever additions to their illustrations of other fables. Thus both the fox and the crow get distracted when the mule with a casket of gold passes by on 24. FC shows up again on 44 as a short distraction in FS. This is very high quality comics work! One particularly good effect has to do with the destruction of the unwitting. Thus the weasel and rabbit destroyed by Raminogrobis the cat are represented in the last pane only by their characteristic clothing, which is all that is left of them (10). Earlier the corpse of the wolf who had masqueraded as a shepherd is hanged with a shepherd's crook through his heart (5). Do not miss the great pane of wolf's eyes on the top of 38. The final picture of OF on 53 has a Red Cross cart and a puddle of blood where there used to be a frog. UP plays well with the deceitful talk between fox and rooster, as when the author gives the fox a thought-bubble of a meal while the fox himself talks peace or when the rooster uses binoculars to see "dogs" who are in fact grazing cows (56). AD is graced with a particular mordant pane on the ant's bite of the archer (65). TH is done with unicycle and hot-dog motorcycle (70). One of the best stories here for filling the gaps with great pictures is OR (74). Do not miss the animals waiting at the bus stop in spring in "Le Cheval et le Loup" (85). The first picture for "Les Animaux malades de la peste" is a spine-tingler done in black, blue, and purple (95). In fact, this fable turns out to be a delight, as when the artist pictures the lamb hearing the fox say that the murderous lion did sheep an honor by eating them (97)! By the end of that page, everyone has a halo over his head, including the dangling spider. The story ends dramatically on 99 with the fly-infested skeleton of the poor ass who confessed to eating some of the monks' grass as he passed along their meadow. I have never seen a stag with a rack like that on 100! Another favorite of mine is FM on 110-13, which ends with the hawk's nestlings picking over the bones of both the frog and the mouse. "Le Chat et le Renard" (33-35) is one candidate for the book's most unusual style. Another is "La Mort et le Bûcheron" (66) with its appropriately heavy blues and blacks. I enjoy the variety and wit that go into these depictions. I want to see about using them in some interactive mode with people.

2010 La Gansa que Puso el Huevo de Oro/The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg. Shaun Chatto; Spanish translation by Marta Belen Saez-Cabero. Illustrated by Jago. Paperbound. London: Mantra Lingua. Aud 11.48 from The Book Depository, Gloucester, UK, through abe, Dec., '12.

There are actually two distinct goose fables narrated bilingually here. The back cover has at its top "Goose Fables." The two fables are GGE and TT. This is another Mantra Lingua series matching various languages with English. This one is available in seventeen different combinations with English; others in the series are "Fox Fables," which I have in three of its variations, and "Lion Fables," which I have only in English-and-Chinese. This book is also set up for use with the RecorderPEN. The version of GGE here has lovely touches of whimsy. The goose wanders onto the widower's property. The latter plans to cook the goose but is so tired from running around that he falls asleep. The next morning he finds the first golden egg. As his riches pile up, he gets himself a violin; he does not have to work any longer. He invites the goose to a music fest and then chops its head off. TT starts by describing the tortoise as one who talks long and incessantly about himself. The other animals think he has gone mad. He becomes friends with two visiting "Geese Brothers." When they need to head back home, he invents the plan to fly with them. People along their route are amazed, but the tortoise thinks that they are making fun of him, and he decides to tell them off. He lands on a large, leafy bush and almost kills a hare. When the latter mentions it, the tortoise starts to expostulate but then catches himself: "I'm sorry Mr Hare, sometimes I talk without thinking and that's why I landed on you."

2010 Les Fables de La Fontaine. René Hausman. Hardbound. Paris: Dupuis. €33.25 from Amazon.fr, Nov., '10.

René Hausman is a celebrated illustrator of comic books in Belgium and France. Here is his La Fontaine, and it is wonderful! In image and after image, I found myself saying either "He has it right!" or "I have not thought of that approach to this fable." This is an impressive volume of some seventy-nine fables, each with at least one trenchant illustration. One knows hardly where to start in this explosion of artistry! Look at FS on 10 and 11. Hausman catches the chagrin of the outwitted fox wonderfully. When it comes to humans, look at "The Worker and His Sons" on 16-17. Hausman catches the youth of these three figures. They will learn! I love the dimensions of "The Bear and the Lover of Gardens" (22-23). The rock is about to come crashing down on the insect -- and the head of the bear's own sleeping friend. Hausman is clever to avoid the problem many illustrators have with "The Fly and the Coach" by bringing the insect to the foreground and putting the whole caravan of travelers in the background (30-31). Again in "The Banker and the Cobbler" (56-57), Hausman does an excellent job with the faces of the two protagonists: one small and the other expansive. TMCM on 62-63 contrasts the two phases of the rats' experience brilliantly: the color of the orgy stands out against the black-and-white fear of the flight. Grippeminaud could not be more frightening than he is on 74 as the witless weasel and hare approach. He already recognizes them as victims. The approach to MSA on 86-87 took me completely by surprise, but it fits the piece well. Recognize nature -- yours and his -- and be smart. TT on 94-95 surprised and delighted me. I have never before seen an artist focus on the ducks who have lost their cargo. CW represents another surprise. Where other artists dwell on the pursuit, this is a loving picture-portrait, except that she is dangling a mouse on her fingers (98). SM (126-7) is a weird entry into anatomical and digestive processes; it images the fable perfectly. The second image for "The Lion in Love" (140) is classic. He has little idea what is hitting him -- and no defense. The four scenes of "The Villager and the Serpent" (166-7) track well the craziness at work in this story." There is a T of C on 174-5. This is a major contribution to the tradition of illustration for La Fontaine's fables.

2010 Les Fables de La Fontaine et Hitler. Illustrations par J.-Y. Mass and D. Collot. Paperbound. Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines/Éditions Fernand Sorlot. €16.21from Amazon.com, Oct., '11.

I have known several of the designs in this book for years and despaired of ever finding them. Here they are in a facsimile reproduction of the 1939 original. That original was apparently published shortly before the German conquest of France and the consequent destruction of materials like this, materials critical of Nazis. Ten fables are presented with their La Fontaine texts utterly intact. The blurb on the back cover has it right: "Cet album, textes et dessins, dénonçait la férocité et la mégalomanie du chancelier allemand." In this book, I would say, it is the satirical illustrations that make the difference! Several seem to me to apply less well. Among those that may seem to stretch La Fontaine in order to criticize Hitler, I would list FC and GA. Who is that asking Hitler the crow to drop the cheese that is Poland? And I would never have envisioned Hitler as the artist grasshopper needing to ask the ants for shelter.. Several illustrations, though, hit the mark perfectly! Those that seem made for criticizing Hitler have the representations that I have seen and remembered, particularly WL and MM. Hitler as a milkmaid is a riot! Notice the doll or girl lying near the lamb in WL's illustration. "The Wolf Become a Shepherd" portrays the shepherd as the angel of peace sleeping in the pasture. One that seems more a prophecy than a critique is OR. Who is that goddess that sends the lightning down to uproot the Hitler-oak? OF similarly looks forward to Hitler's self-explosion. I ordered a second copy of this book in order to scan these illustrations without harming this good copy. Now, of course, I am all the more eager to discover a 1939 copy somewhere, somehow.

2010 Les Fables de La Fontaine pour réfléchir. Laetitia Pelisse. Illustrations de Mauro Mazzari. Paperbound. Paris: Collection "Des mots pour réfléchir": Oskar Jeunesse: Éditions Oskarson. €11.66 from amazon.fr, Nov., '10.

This is a fine book! It works from thirteen of La Fontaine's best known fables. For each there is a four-page spread, as is indicated in the T of C on 5. The first pair of pages presents La Fontaine's text and a humorous full-page colored illustration of the fable. In FC, for example, the crow looks quite glum while the fox runs off excitedly with a full Camembert-like round of cheese in his mouth. The next two pages present a standard set of good elements: a short statement of the moral in La Fontaine's words; an explication of the moral with an example; a set of questions engaging reflection on the moral and often challenging the extent of its applicability; a "What do you think?" section labelled "Conclusion"; and a game of some sort with the fable. The latter section might ask the young reader to fill in words of a related proverb or explain a proverbial image associated with the fable. If I were a young person, I would find this book highly engaging. I am older and I find it engaging! Mazzari uses humor effectively to enliven his illustrations. The heron has the snail balanced on his snout (11)! The horse sits chomping clover while the ass suffers at the summit of a high hill (14). In perhaps the best illustration of the book, the fox stands on the arms of a wobbling chair to reach his paw into the vase while the stork enjoys his food. His vase by the way has a wider mouth and a see-through neck, so that we can see his beak at work finding food at the bottom (30). There is a kind of Goreyesque humor in the depiction of the stag whose antlers have been caught (38). Notice the ears silhouetted in the foreground; animals are ready to attack this stag On 50, the grasshopper uses his guitar to shield himself from the rain as he looks at the ant enjoying a cup of tea in his well protected tower. This is great imaginative work!

2010 Les Fables de La Fontaine: Tome 2. Mylène Villeneuve. First impression. Hardbound. Quebec: Éditions Ada Inc. $19.50 from Brian Harling, Toronto, Sept., '11, through eBay.

This volume comes out one year after its companion and with similar bibliographical data. It is a heavy book offering on some 323 pages half of La Fontaine's fables, each with a full-page colored illustration. An AI at the beginning is also a T of C. This volume presents those fables beginning with the letters L through V. This arrangement has a particular advantage: someone wanting to find a number of fables about one animal -- like the lion -- can find some of them grouped together here. Of course the character one seeks might be mentioned second in the title and then one still has to seek elsewhere. I find the illustrations simple and dramatic. Is there a certain lack of definition inherent in this art medium? Are the illustrations computer-generated? Among the best of the illustrations are "La Lice et sa Compagne" (15); "Le Loup, la Chèvre et le Chevreau" (61); "Les Membres et l'Estomac" (103); "L'Ours et l'Amateur des Jardins" (146); "Les Deux Pigeons" (180); "Le Renard, le Loup et le Cheval" (213); FG (232); and "Les Souris et le Chat-Huant" (274). In the end, I wonder if this artistic style does not have a lot to do with the art of recent graphic novels and comic books. The outer spine has been bruised and gouged.

2010 Mes toutes premières Fables de La Fontaine. Illustrations d'Olivia Cosneau. Hardbound. Champigny-sur-Marne: Éditions Lito. €11.71 from Amazon.fr, Oct., '11.

Five fables are presented with their full La Fontaine texts and pictures adapted to very young children. One special feature of this book is the large round hole in its cover, allowing the viewer to see through to a child, a fox and a crow. A second unusual feature is the variety of materials used in the illustrations. They sound wonderfully exotic in French: feutrine, feutrine peinte, tissus imprimés, fourrure synthétique, maille tricotée, madras, raphia, fil à canevas, fil à coudre.. The fables presented here are FC, GA, LM, AD, and OF. Those wanting a good sampling of the illustration style might want to look first in AD.

2010 Mille Fabulae et Una: 1001 Aesop's Fables in Latin. Laura Gibbs. Paperbound. Morrisville, NC: Lulu Publishers. $19.94 from the publisher, Sept., '10. Extra copy from the publisher at the same time.

My hat is off to Laura for producing this lovely book. There is one -- one! -- page that stands between the reader and the beginning of enjoying the 1001 Latin fables. This page gives the reader what she or he needs to know about finding more information about fable, for example, or about where these fables come from. This single page also alerts the reader to the fact that the book is available free in pdf form on the web. What a generous gift! The fables are grouped by characters. Readers may want to keep a finger at 435, where the character groups are identified. I am delighted to see that Fr. Desbillons is the source of some 120 of the fables here. Laura is good enough to urge readers enjoying those to try the originals available through Google books. I am eager to try sprinkling in some of these fables when I teach Latin this summer! By the way, 417 presents one good way to get into the genre of fables: some characteristics to watch for, not any one of which completely delimits the genre. And there is a T of C on 437, the last page of the book. Congratulations, Laura! 

2010 Mr Aesop's Story Shop. Bob Hartman. Illustrated by Jago. First edition, first printing. Hardbound. Oxford: A Lion Children's Book: Lion Hudson. $10.19 from ABC Books, UK, through Amazon.com, Nov., '10.

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

2010 Phaedrus Construed: The Fables of Phaedrus Construed Into English.  Paperbound.  London/La Vergne, TN: Simpkin, Marshall, and Company/Kessinger Legacy Reprints.  See 1847/2010.

2010 Phaedrus, Select Fables: Translated Literally In the Latin Order, For the Use Of Charterhouse School.  Paperbound.  London/La Vergne, TN: M. Sewell/Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprints.  See 1853/2010.

2010 Rabbit and Turtle Go to School/Conejo y Tortuga van a la escuela. Lucy Floyd. Illustrated by Christopher Denise. Apparent first printing. Paperbound. Boston: Green Light Readers: Level 1: Sandpiper: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $1.98 from Powell's, Portland, OR, July, '11.

This is a fine reader for little kids beginning their reading of stories. Rabbit goes by foot, while Turtle takes the bus. Rabbit's big mistake is stopping for a snack along the way, perhaps because he sees that the bus makes stops. As they go into school, Turtle suggests that they race again tomorrow. He will give Rabbit a head start. 

2010 Reynard the Fox In South Africa Or Hottentot Fables and Tales.  W.H.I. Bleek.  Hardbound.  London/La Vergne, TN: Trübner and Company/Kessinger Publishing.  See 1864/2010.

2010 Robert Henryson: The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables. Translated by Seamus Heaney. First printing. Paperbound. London: Faber and Faber. $11.35 from Warnock Books, Dublin, Ireland, through abe, Nov., '11.

This sturdy paperback includes seven of Henryson's thirteen fables, nicely translated, to judge from the first two, CJ and TMCM. Scots and English are presented on facing left and right pages, respectively. TMCM is particularly charming. The town mouse says to the country mouse that her own town Good Friday beats her sister's Easter Sunday. At the town meal they are mice and not humans and so they do not take any wine. Perhaps in the same spirit they do not say grace before the meal The first disruption is from a steward. The second comes from a cat who all but kills the country mouse before the latter can escape between the drapes and the wall. Other fables here include LM, "The Preaching of the Swallow," "The Fox, the Wolf and the Carter"; "The Fox, the Wolf and the Farmer"; and FM. Henryson's fables are full of allusion and detail and extend at times to twelve pages per fable. The hardbound version was apparently first published in 2009.

2010 Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary.  David Sedaris.  Illustrations by Ian Falconer.  Dust-jacket.  Hardbound.  NY: Little, Brown, and Company.  Gift of Molly Davies, Nov., '11.

This is a wonderful little book!  Sedaris is wise to title the book from "Squirrel Meets Chipmunk"  after a delightfully whistful story.  These strong stories are, I would say, one step beyond Thurber.  The characterization is pushed beyond the normal borders of fable, but the upshot is much the same as one finds from fables.  We learn, that is, about human foibles.  Often, as in Thurber and particularly in Bierce, there is a sudden turn at the end of the fable.  Thus the bear that makes a habit of getting sympathy for the dead bear that she claimed as her mother finally takes an interest in another bear, only to be reduced like him to being a circus bear without teeth.  Similarly, the mouse that keeps a pet snake ends up inside the snake.  Some stories carve out a tone that goes far beyond what fable can normally do.  I think particularly of "The Faithful Setter," a view of marital fidelity and infidelity (60).  The most breathtaking piece might be "The Crow and the Lamb" (74), in which what looks like a pleasant conversation leads to a vicious attack by the crow on a newborn lamb's eyes.  I have read twelve of the sixteen stories and enjo

2010 The Animal Fable in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Bruce Shaw. Foreword by Van Ikin. Paperbound. Jefferson, NC, and London: Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy, #20: McFarland and Company. $17.50 from Powell's, Portland, Feb., '11.

I finally broke down and ordered this book, and now I regret it. Chapter 1 is "The Beast Fable," but my sense is that the author is concerned with any animal story in which the animal has human intelligence. Animal fable and animal fantasy meld as a platform for recent science fiction stories involving animals. Ovid and Apuleius are mentioned in the same breath with Aesop as sources for what happens with "animal fable" today. This book will mean more to others to come, and so I am happy to include it in the collection. 

2010 The Christian Aesop: Ancient Fables Teaching Eternal Truths.  W(illiam) H(enry) Anderdon.  Paperbound.  London/LaVergne, TN: Burns, Oates, and Company/Kessinger.  See 1871/2010.

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

2010 The Fabled Fifth Graders of Aesop Elementary School. Candace Fleming. First edition, first printing. Dust-jacket. Hardbound. NY: Schwartz and Wade Books: Random House. $11.99 from amazon.com, Feb., '11.

2010 The Fables of Medieval Armenia. Mkhitar Gosh, Vardan Aygektsi; Translator Hayastan Mashakaryan. Painter M.N. Moks. Paperbound. Yerevan: Publishing House Lusabats. $22.98 from Karo Yegyan, Yerevan, Armenia, through eBay, August, '11.

2010 The Lion and the Mouse: An Aesop Fable Retold and Illustrated by Bernadette Watts.  Second printing.  Paperbound.  NY, London: North-South Books.  See 2007/10.

2010 The Tortoise or the Hare. Toni Morrison & Slade Morrison. Illustrated by Joe Cepeda. Apparent second printing. Dust-jacket. Hardbound. NY: Books for Young Readers: A Paula Wiseman Book: Simon & Schuster. $11.94 from Powell's, Portland, July, '11.

2010 The Trousers: Parables for the 21st Century. Shlomo Kalo; English translation by Philip Simpson. Cover painting by Michael Delacroix. Paperbound. Jaffa, Israel: D.A.T. Publications. Gift of D.A.T. Publications, Dec., '11.

Here are twenty-five short narratives. I have read several, including the key stories pointed out by the author: "The Trousers" and "The Hump." As the publisher's letter to me suggests, these two stories offer the situation and a possible solution. "The Trousers" portrays people in the grip of a serious malady asking God for help. God offers help in the form of a humanly clad angel who announces that he is there to save them. Nobody pays attention. Why? One of the townsfolk tells him that his trousers are outmoded. So he gets stylish trousers and again announces salvation. Again, no one responds. Why? Because, he learns, people do not trust someone is such stylish trousers. The angel says to God that they do not want to be saved, and he is removed from the scene. The malady only gets worse, people stop praying and do not even believe in God. In "The Hump," a generous boy protects and loves a girl mocked for her hump. One day he gets the offer to receive her hump for one day. He bears it well, but she becomes self-centered and rejects him coldly. When the switch is made back, he gets a chance to trade again, but this time he gets to specify the time, even up to "forever." He chooses to take on the hump forever, but she will not let him. As she says to him, "I have learned from you what love is." In that moment the hump leaves her. In other stories, a man fleeing a tiger finally turns and confronts it, only to learn that it is a harmless cat. The one man with courage to brave a river full of monsters to marry the princess finds out that the monsters are lifeless, and he achieves his goal. These are stories of a true believer. They do reach as parables beyond themselves to suggest a whole approach to life. Is there a reason why the engaging cover-picture is presented with the writing mirror-backwards? 

2010 Three Hundred Aesop's Fables: Illustrated Facsimile Edition.  Literally translated from the Greek by the Rev. Geo. Fyler Townsend, M.A.  With one hundred and fourteen illustrations by Harrison Weir.  Paperbound.  Rockville, MD: Wildside Press LLC.  See 1885?/2010.

2010 Yisuo Yuyan (Aesop's Fables) (Chinese). Dongnian Art Design Co. Limited. Hardbound. Guangzhou: Hunan Juvenile & Children's Publishing House. 38 Yuan from Hangzhou Wholesale City Trading Co., Nov., '10.

2010 You Read to Me, I'll Read to You: Very Short Fables to Read Together. By Mary Ann Hoberman. Illustrated by Michael Emberley. First edition, first printing. Dust-jacket. Hardbound. NY: Megan Tingley Books: Little, Brown and Company. $11.08 from Amazon.com, Oct., '10.

2010/11 El libro de las fábulas. Adaptación de Concha Cardeñoso Sáenz de Miera. Ilustrado por Emilio Urberuaga. Segunda edición. Hardbound. Barcelona: Combel Editorial. £14.85 from AwesomeBooks.com, April, '12.

This book represents an important contribution, I believe, to the fable tradition. Generally, each fable takes two pages, and generally there are two images for each. Urberuaga's style, which seems to me similar to that of Quentin Blake, brings a good sardonic punch to the illustration of these sixty-four fables. Let me mention some particularly good images. The rabbit walks away from the deep well, as only the lion's tail is still above the surface (29). The two images work together well on 54-55 to give an image of the frogs' peace and then their consternation when the bull approaches. There is a similar striking contrast between the peaceful lamb lapping up water on 56 and the bloody lambskin left on a tree by the wolf on 57. The very next fable contrasts well the antics of the monkey on 58 with his trappedness as he holds the bait apple on 59. On 66 a cat walks along contented with a mouse-tail hanging out of its mouth; on 67 a whole congregation of mice surround and look at a bell but do nothing. TT here seems to have not a turtle but a frog who plummets to his death (79-81). FK gets two delightful illustrations (96-99), with the latter again showing a frog's legs extending from the stork's beak. The dolphin has a great expression on 108 as he lets his lying monkey sink. "The Fox and the Drum" (150-51) makes a fine cover picture for this excellent book. The drum is split and the fox walks away disappointed. 

2010? Classical Fable Stories. Paperbound. Wuhan, China: Hubei Fine Arts Publishing House. $5 from Jeremy Weiss, Sleepy Hollow, NY, through eBay, Feb., '12.

Here is a shiny large-format booklet of 32 pages presenting BW. Apparently the special appeal of this publisher or of this series is that it can be read with a talking pen, featured on the first page. The outdoor life of the animals seems sentimentalized. They have picnics, and they play checkers. The third event turns out to be the disaster for the boy. The wolf eats all of the sheep. The boy learns, stops lying, and now plays his flute, as the idyllic life seems to have returned to the mountainside. Seven other booklets are shown on the back page as members of the same series. I cannot be sure that they are all fables. The series is colorful if nothing else!

2010? Six Little Fables. Mark Weiss. Hardbound. NY: Mark Weiss Studio. $12.19 from Robinson Street Books, Binghamton, NY, through abe, Feb., '12.

This is a tasteful, thoughtful, creative little book. Each of its six stories is based on a still life photograph offered by the studio. The stories are creative, with unexpected turns and worthy lessons. In the first, a squash gets separated from her longtime lover, but is consoled by a friend who advises that staying on the vine means only rotting. She meets another squash and the second last thing she hears is "Absolutely delicious!" and the last is "That's because it's made with love." In the second, a poodle named Scarlet laments that she is not a prize-winner. At the competition, rain ruins the coiffures of all the prize-winners, but Scarlet runs and jumps into every puddle, loving every bit of it! In the third, Rex the rabbit has had all the greens in the forest and so goes into the next forest, a city. He finally finds there the leafy greens after which he lusts, but at the price of being caged by one of the inhabitants. The pictures used for the six stories and others are included in a set of art stamps in cellophane at the back of the book as issued.

end

 

To top

2011 A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism: Fables from a Mouse, a Parrot, a Bear, a Cat, a Mole, a Pig, a Dog, & a Raven. Slavenka Drakulić. First printing. Paperbound. NY: Penguin Books. $12.35 from Alibris, April, '11.

This book has snuck up on me. I ordered it for the collection only because it included "fables" in its subtitle. I have avoided cataloguing it, suspecting that I would be frustrated at the applied sense of "fables" it would undoubtedly use. It is true that these chapters are no fables, at least to judge from a careful study of the first chapter. But what has surprised me is the engaging and utterly accurate account of life in a communist world. I have been particularly interested in that life since I visited a number of Eastern European communist countries during my doctoral studies in Germany. My brother John and I paid a fascinating visit to the new DDR Museum in Berlin two years ago. As does that museum, this book gets the sense of life in that communist world right with surprising accuracy and nuance. For at least that first "fable," it works wonderfully to have Bohumil, the mouse who has taken up residence at the museum of communism, be the narrator to the visiting rat, Hans. The chapter ranges over key subjects like living in fear, living in want, being watched, censoring oneself, having heroes of freedom, having their reputation tarnished, and the quick and unlamented demise of a system by which millions of people lived. I recommend the book highly to anyone interested in what Eastern Europe experienced between World War II and the Velvet Revolution.

2011 Aesop and the Imprint of Medieval Thought: A Study of Six Fables as Translated at the End of the Middle Ages. Jacqueline de Weever. Paperbound. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company. $38 from Jaxboox, through Amazon.com, Nov., '11.

This study presents a close reading of the prologue and six fables from two early printed editions of Aesop's fables: Spencer Ger's Latin "Esopus Moralisatus" (1497) and "Aesopi fabule" (1526) in Parmigiano, a dialect of northern Italy. The fables are TMCMC, LM, "The Nightingale and the Sparrow Hawk," WL, "The Fly and the Ant," and "The Donkey and the Lap-Dog." As the back cover proclaims, "The selected fables highlight imbalances of power, different stations in life, and the central qeustion of "how shall we live?" The writer is interested in the "voices of the page," which include those of the poet, the translator, the manuscript writer, the commentator, the glossator, and the speaker. De Weever mentions that the text he calls "Esopus Moralisatus" has three other names: "The Fables of Walter of England"; "Anonymous Neveleti"; and "Elegiac Romulus." He is much taken with "materialist philology" which studies all that can and does make it onto a page: text, quotes and actions from characters in the text, translation, note, comment, gloss. Each of these has a voice. He focuses on three of Nojgaard's four original features of the Romulus collection: "a novel treatment of Aesopian matter"; "a certain Eastern tinge"; "inspiration drawn from literary sources"; and "a structural moralization which attests an unshakeable faith in the moral worth of everyday life" (17). (The second of these four will not be a focus for De Weever.) I took only a brief look at the handling of the first fable, WL. I was surprised at how close the two versions are. De Weever is -- true to his first chapter -- alert to the various voices that come off the page in things like word choice, translation, and gloss. 

2011 Äsop: Die Fabeln. Neu erzählt von Gisbert Haefs. Mit Bildern von Fulvio Testa. Erste Auflage. Hardbound. Cologne: Boje Verlag in der Bastei Lübbe. €15.88 from Amazon.de, August, '12.

Here is the German version of the very good fable book published in 2010 in English by Andersen Press. As I wrote there, Testa's style remains similar to the style he showed in his 1989 Barron edition encompassing twenty fables. Here he has tripled the number of fables. The inspiration of some scenes remains the same. The illustrations there were branded by the unusual multi-colored borders. Here the illustrations take up the whole of each right-hand page, while texts are on the left-hand pages. The sleeping hare there had been playing solitaire. Now he is on an ipod (title-page and 31)! WC there and here are the same in inspiration, but the venue has changed (11). The cover has a fine FC, which can also be found on 15. There is real distance between these two characters! FS (29) may have improved. "The Tortoise and the Eagle" (33) is a fine illustration; it gives us a sense of the proud tortoise's smallness. I love the cat hanging with one eye open and fixed on the mouse under the dresser (35). DLS is told twice to accommodate two different versions (38-41). "The Lion, the Bear and the Fox" (86) does a good job of showing the large beasts' exhaustion. This version substitutes a trap of sticks for the hunter's bow in AD (74). "The Lion, Ass, and Fox" is also well done: I have seldom seen such a pile of booty (89)! There is a small head-piece for each text besides the full-page illustration. The two illustrations often work together well. A good example is FWT (84): the headpiece illustrates the trap and the severed tail. The full-page illustration shows the fox without a tail trying to persuade the other foxes to get rid of their tails too. The rhyming morals added here are often quite clever. This is one of several books I found visiting Germany. I had too much luggage so I ordered them as soon as I arrived back home!

2011 Aesop Dress'd or a Collection of Fables Writ in Familiar Verse. Bernard Mandeville. John S. Shea. Paperbound. : Dunda Books. $9.95 from amazon.com, Dec., '11.

The original book of this title was published by Lock's-Head in London in 1704. I have a reprint of that edition by The Augustan Reprint Society (Publication Number 120) at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA. That reprint was done in 1966. There is also a disc of this collection circulating these days. As I wrote of the Augustan Reprint, the book contains thirty-eight fables, almost all from LaFontaine, done in couplets apparently based on the rhythms of Samuel Butler. They move along swiftly enough. LaFontaine is clearly behind this work. This book is a reproduction of that book, printed on demand. Like other "printed on demand" books, it lacks illustrations and a modicum of respect for verse. The scanning machine jams poetry lines together as though they were prose. Apparently no one at Dunda Books checks to see if the product is at all a representation of the original. Here it is not. Neither this book nor the website for Dunda Books seems to give a place where the press exists. 84 pages. There is a familiar colored woodcut on the cover.

2011 Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose. Leslie Kurke. First printing. Paperbound. Princeton, NJ: Martin Classical Lectures: Princeton University Press. Gift of David Johnson, July, '11.

This book is both daunting and fascinating. I look forward to it. It covers a great deal of territory and thus seems worthy of a series like the Martin Classical Lectures. For now, I have to be contented here to quote the back cover's description of Kurke's work. "Examining the figure of Aesop and the traditions surrounding him, Aesopic Conversations offers a portrait of what Greek popular culture might have looked like in the ancient world. What has survived from the literary record of antiquity is almost entirely the product of an elite of birth, wealth, and education, limiting our access to a fuller range of voices from the ancient past. This book, however, explores the anonymous Life of Aesop and offers a different set of perspectives. Leslie Kurke argues that the traditions surrounding this strange text, when read with and against the works of Greek high culture, allow us to reconstruct an ongoing conversation of "great" and "little" traditions spanning centuries. Evidence going back to the fifth century BCE suggests that Aesop participated in the practices of nonphilosophical wisdom (sophia) while challenging it from below, and Kurke traces Aesop's double relation to this wisdom tradition. She also looks at the hidden influence of Aesop in early Greek mimetic or narrative prose writings, focusing particularly on the Socratic dialogues of Plato and the Histories of Herodotus. Challenging conventional accounts of the invention of Greek prose and recognizing the problematic sociopolitics of humble prose fable, Kurke provides a new approach to the beginnings of prose narrative and what would ultimately become the novel. Delving into Aesop, his adventures, and his crafting of fables, Aesopic Conversations shows how this low, noncanonical figure was--unexpectedly--central to the construction of ancient Greek literature." 

2011 Aesop's Fables. Beverley Naidoo. Illustrations by Piet Grobler. First printing. Dust-jacket. Hardbound. London: Frances Lincoln Children's Books. £14.99 from Blackwell, Oxford, August, '11.

This book put together by two persons who grew up in South Africa is a serious addition to the Aesop tradition. Its particular niche is that it uses African animals in otherwise perfectly traditional Aesopic fables. Thus we have jackal for fox, tamboti for oak, warthog for boar, and kudu for stag. I find both the tellings and the illustrations unusually attentive to the working of the tales. That attention is born out in Naidoo's "Dear Reader" that immediately precedes the fables: "Aesop's fables aren't like fairy tales from Europe with 'happy ever after' endings. They are much more like traditional African stories. Life is tough.and things can end badly for anyone who doesn't watch out or use their wits!" (7). That introduction argues even that Aesop's background was African. Naidoo pays good attention to both the tellings and morals. Thus the "Old Lion" story is moralized this way: "Not everyone is fooled by an old trick" (9). And in "The Eagle and the Tortoise," the tortoise claims "I can wave my flippers in the air. Just get me up there and I'll show you" (10). I am surprised by the image of Aesop riding on a panther with his arms and legs bound (6). I would not have thought of that as a way to convey a captured slave! The illustrations are done with pencil and watercolors. I am delighted to welcome this new work to the collection!

2011 Aesop's Fables. Larry Bryant Glisson. Illustrated by Ernest Griset. First printing. Hardbound. Gainesville, FL: www.thelivingclassics.com: Doberwarez Multimedia. $26.28 from amazon.com, Sept., '11.

"160 Classic Lessons in Ethics, Critical Thinking and Common Sense With More Than 150 Colorized Nineteenth-Century Engravings." So says the back cover. It is fascinating for me to see Griset colorized. I wonder what his response would have been. Among the successes here might be the two pictures on the covers, WL and "The Man Who Dropped His Axe." Others would be DS (7), "The Man and the Snake" (12), FC (77), "The Thief and the Dog" (93), and "The Elphant and the Animal Assembly" (139). There are more garish results elsewhere. Unusual results come when flesh tones and little else is filled in, as in "Aesop and His Fellow Servants" (72) and "The Sea and the Rivers" (79). Here the fables are usually one to a page, sometimes with a text facing an illustration. No fable seems to run over onto a second page. I remain fascinated that Griset ventured to put three foxes onto his illustration for FG, while I think that this fable demands a single fox doing whatever he does (45). There is a T of C after 178.

2011 Aesop's Fables. Retold by Margaret McAllister. Illustrated by Amanda Hall. First edition, first printing. Dust-jacket. Hardbound. Oxford: The Lion Classic: Lion Children's: Lion Hudson. £10.67 from Awesome Books, Wallingford, UK, April, '12.

I agree with the back cover of both the book and the dust-jacket: "A perceptive retelling of 28 classic fables, full of wit and wisdom, and a book to treasure for a lifetime." This is a worthy recent entry into the long fable tradition. The texts of the fables seem lively and engaging. The illustrations are done, one or two to each story, in a primitive style that I find engaging. Do not miss, for example, the matchng pictures of father and daughters (35 and 36). Again, two images portray four excellent faces for FS (54-55). And again in SW, there are two strong contrasting images (82-83). Do not miss finally the dramatic second image in BW (119). Each story's title is marked with a standard image: Are those olives or grapes? And each fable's moral is framed in a standard box with an accompanying animal. As is utterly appropriate for this book's approach to Aesop, the author adds a good pair of pieces at the end on Aesop and on herself. 

2011 Aesop's Fables. Translated by Wuli Li Yuliang. Illustrator NA. Paperbound. Beijing: Spring Series: Hebei Education Publishing Press. See 2006/11.

2011 Aesop's Fables. Ronald Keller. #7 of 50 copies; signed by Ronald Keller. Hardbound. Bremen, Maine and New York, NY: Red Angel Press. $650 from The Veatchs Arts of the Book, Northampton, MA, June, '11.

This is a strange treasure! It is surely one of the curiosities of this collection. Keller explains: "The fables are illustrated by cast paper images of architectural adornments on buildings in the borough of Manhattan, New York City." Nideggen paper. 9½" square. 14 pages. Bound by the artist: tan cloth over boards with cast paper bas relief of "Aesop" on front cover. Hand set and printed letterpress in American Garamond 648 by Ronald Keller. The deciding factor in the selection of fables chosen here are architectural elements represented in the bas reliefs. As Priscilla Juvelis explains in her advertising blurb on the book, "The animals portrayed are to be found on buildings in the Borough of Manhattan as an integral part of the facades - not as subsidiary features or stand-apart sculpture or plaza decoration. The animals portrayed are the Lion, Rat and Elephant, Bull, and Bear. Each bas-relief image faces its page of appropriate fables. These open first to the left, then top, bottom, and lastly, to the right, so that all images may be seen when the book is fully opened. The street address where the Lion, Rat and Elephant, Bull and Bear reside is printed below the cast paper bas-relief. A beautifully constructed book, with images of the familiar creatures of these fables that amuse as well as bring the stories to life. It is quite a task for a bas-relief, but these white paper casts are more than up to it as they fit so perfectly on the tan paper and are set off by the black ink." Do not miss the last page that turns up when all others have been opened; it contains Keller's signature and this copy's number. Strange and wonderful!

2011 Aesop's Fables: a Pop-Up Book. Agnese Baruzzi. Hardbound. London: Tango Books. £11.93 from Awesome Books, Wallingford, UK, April, '12.

Here is the English version, attributed to Aesop, of a French version from the same year that is attributed to La Fontaine and published by Cerise Bleue: Les Fables de La Fontaine animees (Pop-up). As I wrote there, the designs seemed to me somehow familiar when I noticed that the "concept" belongs to Claire Littlejohn and Manth. The seven fables offered here are TH, "L'Ours et les Abeilles," FG, "Le Loup déguisé en Agneau," GA, DS, and LM. The best paper constructions might be the first two. The seven are listed on the back cover.

2011 Aesop's Fables: A Pop-Up Book of Classic Tales. Paper Engineering by Kees Moerbeek; Illustrated by Chris Beatrice and Bruce Whatley. First edition. First printing.. Hardbound. NY: Little Simon: Simon and Schuster Children's Publishing. $18.46 from Amazon.com, Oct., '11. Extra copy from Amazon.com for $18.47, October, '11.

2011 Ageless Fables. Rhymes by Seldon Thomas Childers. Illustrations by Diana Buck. Paperbound. Lexington, KY: Seldon Thomas Childers. $18.98 from Amazon.com, July, '12.

Apparently privately printed, though sold on Amazon. Forty fables on iv + 81 pages. 8" x 10". Each fable gets a two-page spread including a page of verse text sometimes with some colored ornament and a full-page colored illustration. A sampling of the texts suggests heavy influence from rhyme and meter; my test for that influence lies in filler phrases not needed by the story. The illustrations are lively and apt. "The Scorpion and the Frog" is a good early example (2). The Kirkus Review on the final page rightly praises this strophe in this fable: "'Whoa,' said Frog, 'Ya think I'm daft?/ To use my body for a raft,/ and haul a cargo such as you,/ one quick stick could kill us two!'" Besides other good traditional fables like GA, FC, TMCM, and DW, there are other stories here, like "The Three Pigs" (33). In this book's version of OF, the frog wants to be as big as a horse, and he tries to do it by drinking himself bigger (13). MSA here involves a horse, and there is a dramatic picture of the two humans carrying the horse (28). In FM, the hawk chooses to drop the mouse and grab the frog; how can he when they are tied to each other (45)? "Tassy" is about a Tasmanian Devil that spun everything level; he spun up his own ear and is now a level devil (57). The final page suggests that this is a "print on demand" book.

2011 Bingsop's Fables: Little Morals for Big Business. Stanley Bing. Illustrations by Steve Brodner. First edition, first printing. Dust-jacket. Hardbound. NY: HarperCollins. $5.99 from amrolulu, Lake Hopatcong, NJ, on eBay, August, '11.

Here is another entry in the ongoing series of books using Aesop to say something about business life. The tenor of this volume is suggested by the titles of its first few fables: "Shit Flows Downhill, but Not Forever"; "The Human Resources Guy Who Became Something of a Hipster"; and "The Media Mogul Who Pissed Off His Limo Driver." Each fable has its own incisive drawing by Steve Brodner. Those illustrations seem to me to follow Charles Bennett: dressed up animals are nicely accented to suggest the ugliness of what is going on. In fact, more of Aesop may surface in those drawings than in the stories themselves. I appreciate the depiction of Bingsop's death in the "Translator's Note": an audience of drunken security analysts in Las Vegas attacked him when he did not sufficiently disguise his attacks on them! A "Final Note" on 219 pays good homage to Aesop. Bing found his fables at first often hard to decipher. "But after a while, as I made my way through them, it became clear to me that many of the lessons contained within were extremely germane not so much in everyday life but most certainly in the world of business, where foxes, wolves, lions, bears, and weasels still run free." So they do! The colored dust-jacket cover shows a sleeping Bingsop with Ipad, surrounded by dressed animals.

2011 Die schönsten Tierfabeln. Erzählt von Ursel Scheffler. Mit Bildern von Hans-Günther Döring. Hardbound. Freiburg/Vienna/Basel: Kerle bei Herder. €19.95 from Amazon.de, August, '12.

Here are 58 fables with sprightly illustrations. The fun begins with the animal cartoons that surround the opening T of C. Even before then, there is a worm crawling on the final "N" of the book's title on the title-page. Among the best illustrations is one of those for TMCM that shows the two mice napping after enjoying the city-meal (11). Ants are having tea together underneath the stork's chair in FS (17). On 32, the monkey is enjoying nuts while the cat lies with both front paws bandaged! "Die neun dummen Wölfe" (58) is new to me but presented here as the oldest known fable, known from a clay tablet from Sumeria. Ten wolves draw ten sheep away from the flock. The wolf leader says to his fellow wolves "You are nine. Here is one sheep that is yours, and that makes ten. I and nine sheep also make ten. I am distributing fairly, ten to ten." All the wolves clamor their approval, and the leader makes off with the nine sheep. Among the best of these spirited illustrations is that of the dog who falsely accused the lamb and makes off with her wool. We see on 74 a lamb who has only a tuft left on her head and around her middle. Morals are rendered in rhyming verses. The moral of porcupines trying to live together (85) starts with these two lines: "Man kommt sich näher,/wenn man Abstand hält…." The crowe decked out in others' feathers is another masterpiece (89)! One of the best full-page illustrations presents the two goats arguing on the bridge (99). GA ends with a reconciliation and a personal concert for the ant (109). The six-page overview of the genre at the book's end is well done. 

2011 El libro de las fábulas.  Adaptación de Concha Cardeñoso Sáenz de Miera.  Ilustrado por Emilio Urberuaga.  Segunda edición.  Hardbound.  Barcelona: Combel Editorial.  See 2010/11.

2011 Fable Stories. Illustrated by Liljana Arsovska and Nathan Jones. Paperbound. Chinese Classical Stories Series: China Intercontinental Press. $20.50 from Book-wholesale.com, Nov., '11.

2011 Fables d'Ésope. Adaptation de Jean-Philippe Mogenet. Illustré par Jean-François Martin. Hardbound. Toulouse, France: Milan Jeunesse. €16.90 from Lecume des pages, Paris, July, '12.

This large-format book offers twenty-six Aesopic fables with a distinctive illustration for each. The art makes abundant use of big spaces to make its good points about the fables. In twenty-four of the cases here, that means a full page of illustration. In the other two, it means a double-page. Both of those double-page illustrations are strong: "The Stag at the Pool and the Lion" (46-47) and "Goat and Wolf" (60-61). Other strong illustrations include WC (17); "The Lion and the Hare" (25, with a detail repeated on the title-page); "The Tortoise and the Eagle" (27); DS (35); and FG (51). Martin has a style all its own. It shows some dependency, I would say, on Art Deco. I am happy to see the French pay some attention to Aesop! 

2011 Fables: Jean de La Fontaine. Illustrations Brigitte Susini. First edition. Paperbound. Paris: Hachette Livre/Gautier-Languereau. €4.68 from Amazon.fr, Oct. '11.

Thirteen fables of La Fontaine are presented here in a pleasing style in a book about 6¼" x 7". The fable text takes one page or, in two cases, two. The single text pages are all left-hand pages. The right-hand page then presents a full-page colored illustration. I am surprised at FC, which is also on the cover. Do we not need a crow in a tree to make this fable work? In the illustration for "The Lion Going to War," Susini cleverly hides the courier rabbit, just as the other animals overlook him (7). The illustration for GA (11) is surprisingly wistful and contemplative. The milkmaid on 19 is losing not only her pail of milk, shown here in mid fall, but some of her eggs besides. FG (21) is cleverly shown from above. The frog in OF has an overblown belly and chest that is wonderfully comic (31).

2011 I.A. Krylov: Quartet (Russian). Various artists. Paperbound. Moscow: Skaski: Tales: Altey. $4.95 from Olga Sleptsova, Moscow, through eBay, August, '12.

This is one of five books in a series of "Tales" done recently by Altey. Three seem to fall outside the realm of fables. These are children's pamphlets of 12 pages, 6¼" x 9". This pamphlet contains five fables: "The Cock and the Cuckoo"; "The Ass and the Nightingale"; "The Monkey and the Spectacles"; "Quartet"; and "The Monkey and the Mirror." The illustrations are, for a young children's booklet, typically energetic and emphatic. The year of publication is given after each fable. "Quartet" is pictured on the cover.

2011 I.A. Krylov: Vorona u Licisa (Fox and Crow). Various artists. Paperbound. Moscow: Skaski: Tales: Altey. $4.95 from Olga Sleptsova, Moscow, through eBay, August, '12.

This is one of five books in a series of "Tales" done recently by Altey. Three seem to fall outside the realm of fables. These are children's pamphlets of 12 pages, 6¼" x 9". This pamphlet contains five fables: FC; WC; FG; WL; and "The Lion and the Fox." The last of these is excellent: the three illustrations match the short fable perfectly. People who impress us at first may turn out to be quite ordinary. The illustrations are, for a young children's booklet, typically energetic and emphatic. The year of publication is given after each fable. FC is pictured on the cover.

2011 Jean de La Fontaine en bandes dessinées. Various artists. Textes biographiques: Marion Lecoq. Paperbound. Editions Petit à Petit. €18.30 from Librairie Album, Paris, July, '12.

This book is based on a smaller-format, shorter hardbound book by the same publisher in 2006. Finding the book was a lucky moment during a chance stop at a corner bookstore for new books in Paris soon after my arrival. There are now seventeen fables included, six more than in the earlier volume. The new fables include "The Old Man and Three Youths"; "The Animals Sick from the Plague"; "The Two Roosters"; LM; BC; and "The Pig, the Goat, and the Lamb." Of these the firt two may be the strongest in their illustrations. Other additions include a beginning T of C and a pictured title-page for each fable. The eleven repeating cartoons are identical but larger here. As I wrote there, the fables are portrayed faithfully, each first in a normal text before its graphic presentation. Many fables are followed by a short section of La Fontaine's biography by Marion Lecoq. The back cover again offers a picture for each fable and the artist for the fable; now these cartoon titles follow the order in which they are found in the book. The artistic styles are highly different from each other. I mentioned there the strong impact made by CW by Eden Pacino and Boris Joly-Erard (41-52). The artists here are open to updating the fables. Thus the tortoise of TH (67-75) is a young woman with a huge backpack; she does carry her house! The cart that is stuck is really an autobus overloaded with baggage (77-84). This penchant may go too far in TT (97-107) when the birds' "machine" turns out not to be a simple stick but an air-balloon with two baskets connected with a stick. Why could the turtle not ride in one of the baskets? 

2011 La Oveja negra y demas fábulas. Augusto Monterroso. Fourth edition. Paperbound. Madrid: Punto de Lectura: Santillana Ediciones Generales. $15.64 from UnbeatableSale Inc through eBay, Dec., '11.

Monterroso's work seems to be much reproduced. I now have editions produced in the USA, Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Great Britain, and (here) Spain. La Oveja Negra seems to have been copyrighted and originally published in 1969. The first edition of the present version was published in 2007; this is the fourth "Edicion," which I believe means "fourth printing" in this context. The standard -- wonderful! -- fables are here illustrated with generic clip-art illustrations of animals. There is something either very right or very wrong about that mode of illustration! There is an index of proper and geographical names and then a T of C at the back of the book. I am always happy to pay homage to Monterroso!

2011 Les Fables de La Fontaine animees (Pop-up). Agnese Baruzzi. Hardbound. Paris: Cerise Bleue. €13.42 from Amazon.fr, Oct., '11.

These designs seemed to me somehow familiar when I noticed that the "concept" belongs to Claire Littlejohn and Manth. The seven fables offered here are TH, "L'Ours et les Abeilles," FG, "Le Loup déguisé en Agneau," GA, DS, and LM. The best paper constructions might be the first two.

2011 Les Fables de La Fontaine: Un livre-théâtre avec de magnifiques illustrations réalisées en papiers découpés. Illustratrice: Elsa Mora; Ingénieur papier: Julia Fröhlich. Hardbound. Paris: Éditions Auzou. €22.47 from Amazon.fr, Sept., '11.

What a piece of work! This oversize (13½" x 9¼") landscape book contains eight open-faced spreads of pages. On the left is a text. On the right is a stage frame with two dimensions of players and other items on the stage. The effect as the book is open to any given page is three dimensional. The artwork and papercutting are both splendid! The back-cover describes these as the eight "incontournables" fables of La Fontaine, which means something like "the eight that cannot be overlooked." They are FC, GA, TH, TMCM, OF, DW, LM, and FS. My favorites are OF, DW, and FS. I will be curious to see how the paper engineering lasts. For now, this book is a treasure!

2011 Luther's Aesop. Carl P.E. Springer. Paperbound. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press. Gift of Wendy Wright, Nov., '11.

Let me start with Springer's own summary. "The first chapter consists of preliminary considerations of Luther's relationship with the Greco-Roman classical tradition in general. The second examines his knowledge, use, and evaluation of Aesop's fables throughout the course of his life and work. The third chapter considers Luther's work as an editor of Aesop, paying special attention to the preface he wrote for the 1530 collection, which includes his most extensive thoughts on the person and work of Aesop and the value of his fables. The fourth offers searching (if not exhaustive) analyses of the narrative and didactic strategies Luther uses to tell and explain each of the fables included in the Coburg Collection. The final chapter studies Luther as a "fabulist" in his own right, examines the non-Aesopic fables he told and retold (including some of his own composition), and explores the question of his possible influence on later fable tellers and fable theorists, especially in Germany" (xiii).  For me and perhaps for many readers, the most important chapters here are the third and fourth, where Springer translates Luther's preface and fables, respectively, from the Coburg Collection and comments extensively on them. That second chapter includes some 86 times in Luther's writings in which he cites or otherwise uses an Aesopic fable, and Springer comments that "this list is certainly incomplete" (72). Early satiric fables like DLS seem to predominate, e.g., for criticizing the pope, often just with a brief allusion to the fable. Later he became increasingly interested in the fable as a teaching tool, in school and around the dinner table. He began more to tell fables in their entirety. Luther prepared his edition of Aesop's fables in neither Latin nor Greek, but in German. Luther criticizes Aristotle and Epicurus, but he does not criticize Aesop. Nor does he Christianize him. "Luther hardly ever alludes to Christian teachings either in the fables or in the morals that follow them" (75). The fables are worth studying for their own sakes. Luther's prime analogate for the reception of fables is the family dinner table, not the school classroom. The thirteen fables of the unfinished Coburg Collection were first published a decade after Luther's death. A special gift is to have a good English translation of Luther's fables in Chapter Four. I am not sure I have seen the collection in English. Springer's emphasis here is on Luther's narrative genius and on his particular interpretation of the thirteen fables. Luther thought Aesop second only to the Bible for moral value. Luther was acquainted with some forty-four of Aesop's fables, listed with their Perry numbers on 36-37. DS was his favorite. In a turbulent life where Luther changed his opinions, Aesop's fables were something of a constant.

2011 Modern Fables. S. Michael Wilcox and Ted L. Gibbons. Illustrated by Mark McCune. First printing. Hardbound. Springville, Utah: Bonneville Books. $13.49 from Better World Books, April, '11.

There are nine fables in this lively and colorful landscape-formatted book, as the opening T of C makes clear. "The Snake Who Wanted to Put on Pants" (1) comes to the fine moral "If you can't do it alone, find a friend!" Sidney and Sabrina get into a pair of pants together and solve together the problem each had encountered alone. "Hamlet and the Fat and Filthy Friends" (6) features this great line: "The swill is swell if you don't mind the smell!" One of the best -- and squarely in the fable tradition -- is "Wild Weasel's Wit" (11). Wild Weasel outsmarts three animals and eats them, only to be eaten on just the same terms by Griff Grizzly: "Those who set traps for others often catch themselves." A prize goes to the illustration on 20 showing Arnold the Anteater's tongue probing through the front door of the ants' residence. On the very last page, many of the book's characters snooze peacefully together under a tree. There is both wisdom and fun here!

2011 Mouse & Lion. Retold by Rand Burkert. Pictures by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. First edition. Dust-jacket. Hardbound. NY: Michael de Capua Books: Scholastic. Gift of Mary Pat Ryan, July, '12.

What a gorgeous book! The pictures and the texts both treat the story reverently. I was not surprised that the creators of the book went to Africa to get the scenes right. Among the good touches here are the highlighting in the story's title of the primary role of the mouse. The mouse scrambled over a "tawny boulder," and the tawny boulder "rolled over"! The first picture of the slumbering lion is perfect. The mouse's first statement is "Sire, I took you for a mountain -- honestly!" Next the lion dangled the mouse over his menacing mouth, complete with yellowed teeth. The mouse promised to be brave and said he was loyal, and the lion asked him to show it. The mouse hurled himself around on grasses but flopped in trying to prove his bravery. The lion asked him how many battles he had fought, and the mouse replied that he tried to avoid battles. Then the mouse said that he might be able to help the lion in a pinch. After a good laugh, the lion actually extended his paw to be kissed, but the mouse was already tripping over his tail in running away. Another fine illustration has the two face-to-face after the mouse freed the lion. The lion went away thinking about little creatures. "That day, such small things made him happy!" I was so happy with this book that I immediately ordered the author's CD of songs based on Aesop's fables, apparently released only recently. 

2011 Römische Fabeln auf Mühlviardlarisch. Leopold Pammer. Mit Bildern von Raphaela Pammer. Hardbound. Novum Publishing gmbh. €14.67 from Amazon.de, Sept., '12.

The Mühlviertel is an Austrian region belonging to the state of Upper Austria: it is one of four "quarters" of Upper Austria, the others being Hausruckviertel, Traunviertel, and Innviertel. It is named for the two rivers Große Mühl and Kleine Mühl. Here are Phaedrus' fables in this dialect, though the author challenges our normal understanding of the difference between language and dialect; this dialect is for him an independent language (6-7). This book with its illustration has helped me to understand Phaedrus V 9 for the first time (195): the bull went through this opening a long time ago, when he was smaller. He does not need the younger animal's advice about what he has already done many times over. The black-and-white illustrations are good, if simple. They are all sideways -- because landscape -- in a book that is in the traditional portrait frame. Among the best illustrations are those of the fox and owl and their young (57); the eagle, cat, and pig (74); the grasshopper and the owl (114); the fox and the goat (146). The cover's colored rendition of FG seems much livelier than the black-and-white (132). Does the fact that the vocabulary after each fable comes in a standardized table betray the computer-generated character of this book? 

2011 Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary. David Sedaris. Illustrations by Ian Falconer. First printing. Paperbound. NY: Back Bay Books: Little, Brown, and Company. Gift of Wendy Wright, Nov., '11.

As I mentioned about the hardbound version, printed a year earlier, this is a wonderful little book! Sedaris adds one story here: "The Vomit-Eating Flies" (160). Another delight about an unsavory subject! I will repeat my comments from the earlier hardbound version. Sedaris is wise to title the book from "Squirrel Meets Chipmunk" after a delightfully whistful story. These strong stories are, I would say, one step beyond Thurber. The characterization is pushed beyond the normal borders of fable, but the upshot is much the same as one finds from fables. We learn, that is, about human foibles. Often, as in Thurber and particularly in Bierce, there is a sudden turn at the end of the fable. Thus the bear that makes a habit of getting sympathy for the dead bear that she claimed as her mother finally takes an interest in another bear, only to be reduced like him to being a circus bear without teeth. Similarly, the mouse that keeps a pet snake ends up inside the snake. Some stories carve out a tone that goes far beyond what fable can normally do. I think particularly of "The Faithful Setter," a view of marital fidelity and infidelity (60). The most breathtaking piece might be "The Crow and the Lamb" (74), in which what looks like a pleasant conversation leads to a vicious attack by the crow on a newborn lamb's eyes. I have read twelve of the sixteen stories and enjoyed them thoroughly!

2011 The Fables of Leonardo da Vinci. Ed Tasca. Illustrations by Hilary Rowland. Paperbound. Seymour, MO: Heartland Imprints: Heartland: RoseHeart Publishing. $12.94 from Amazon.com, April, '11.

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

2011 The Tortoise and the Jackrabbit/La Tortuga y la Liebre. Susan Lowell. Illustrated by Jim Harris. Paperbound. Flagstaff, AZ: Luna Rising: Rising Moon. $7.95 from Powell's, Portland, OR, July, '11.

Northland Publishing published this book -- mine is in hardbound form -- in 1994. Apparently they also copyrighted a Spanish translation in 2004. Might that have been a hardbound edition? The present paperback was "produced" in China in April of 2011. I suspected that Rising Moon is a bilingual division of Northland Publishing; both are in Flagstaff, AZ. A little checking suggests that they are both parts of Cooper Square Publishing. Let me include comments from that English edition. This beautiful sideways-book does the traditional story wonderfully "with a Southwestern flair." The animals are given character and attitude. Among the best illustrations is that reproduced as the cover. The tortoise has a wonderfully laconic way about her with her dowdy umbrella and older woman's hat. Her first simple reaction is "Let's race." She soon follows it up with "Prove it." Harris brings a wonderful collection of critters to the starting-line. The mayor does some politicking both there and at the finish. The tortoise is given a winner's bouquet of flowers--and then she eats it! A great find.

2011 The Wise Fool: Fables from the Islamic World. Shahrukh Husain. Illustrated by Micha Archer. First edition, first printing. Hardbound. Cambridge, MA: Barefoot Books. $17.26 from Book Lovers USA through abe, Nov., '11.

This large-format, highly colorful book presents twenty-two tales of Mulla Nasruddin, a "merry little figure with a turban and short jacket and a much-loved donkey" (4). Many are wise-guy tales in the direction of Till Eulenspiegel. I do not think that I have ever encountered any of them. I find several particularly captivating. "The Price of Steam" (6) involves a judgment on a man who allegedly bought a cook's steam and therefore should pay for it. Nasruddin's judgment requires the eater to pull out the appropriate coins and jangle them. The sound of the jangling coins is the payment for a cooking pot's steam! In "Across the River" a man shouts across the river to Mulla to ask how he can get to the other side of the river since there are no ferry boats (18). "I don't know why you need a ferry boat. You're already on the other side of the river." Arriving sweaty and stinky at a bath after a trip, Mulla is poorly treated by the attendants but gives them each a gold coin. A week later he comes again and is therefore royally treated but gives each a normal coin. "This is for last week. The gold coins were for today" (34-36). Mulla and Nedim agree to buy and share a large bowl of yogurt. Then Nedim refuses to put his sugar into the center; he will sugar only his side. Mulla thereupon pulls out olive oil and threatens to pour it into his side. Nedim backs down and agrees to put his sugar in the middle (52). In "One-Legged Geese," Mulla eats a goose drumstick on the way to delivering the whole goose to the emperor and then convinces the emperor that all geese have only one leg (54-57). The illustrations are strong. Their style is well indicated in the first picture of Mulla and his donkey on 5. Perhaps the best of them is the last, which pictures accounts Mulla had done on pastry, because the emperor made the last overseer eat his accounts (60-61).

2011 99 fables by william march. Edited with an introduction by William T. Going. Illustrated by Richard Brough. Paperbound. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. $22.27 from abe books, Nov., '11.

Here is the paperback version, apparently first published in 2011, of the 1960 University of Alabama first edition. The copyright seems to have been renewed in 1988. The work was first done, apparently, in 1940 and may have continued from there on until 1960. This book has the same texts, illustrations, and pagination as the hardbound version of 1960. As I wrote when I first found the book in 1994, it represents a genuine surprise. After I have read so many books that promise fables but offer something else, here are real fables! William Edward March Campbell apparently worked over this collection for years and had it refused once by one of the publishers of his other works. Except for a very few that mention Aesop (#1, #97, and #98) and one that deliberately redoes his work (#30), the fables are original. Is it wrong to take #1 and #97 as programmatic? The former concludes "the fable is, and always had been, the platitude's natural frame" (2) and the latter has the Delphians killing Aesop in Going's words "not because of the warming of the oracle and not because his wit was too sharp and biting, but because he told fables--nothing but fables--and he was boring" (xviii). Going places March apart from Ade and Thurber, for his style is purposefully flat and folk-like, and totally apart from the allusive, decorative manner of La Fontaine and Gay. He places him rather with Bierce, for his fables are sharp and ironic (xvi-xvii). I find them tending overall more than I would want toward a scolding tone. But there is also a rich variety of humor, as when the escaped elephant admits that he has been too thin-skinned for life among humans (5). Typical and insightful is "The Peacock and His Bride," where the central character admits that what the two have in common is that "we both love me to distraction" (74). Let me list some other fables worth a special look: #29, 52, 53, 56, 57, 64, 71, 77, 84, and 88. Brough's work is often strong, e.g., on xxiv and 58.

end

 

2012 A table avec Jean de La Fontaine: 55 recettes fabuleuses et morales de nos campagnes. Rédaction des recettes: Coco Jobard. Benjamin Rabier et aquarelles d'Hippolyte Romain; photographies Fabrice Subiros. Dust-jacket. Hardbound. Paris: Agnes Vienot Editions. €29.90 from Librairie L'Appetit Vient en Lisant, Paris, July, '12.

This was a lucky find on my first afternoon in Paris. I seldom bother these days with new book stores. It was even less likely this day, when I had Gibert Jeune and similar bookstores at hand. I stopped in and asked about fables and they brightened up immediately and took me right to this impressive book. The book is a lavish combination of good sounding recipes, mouth-watering photographs, delightful Rabier illustrations, and sprightly Romain watercolors. "Manger pour ne pas être mangé, c'est le leitmotiv des 'Fables' et l'ambition de ce livre" (8). 33 fables and 55 recipes. An index of recipes at the end is nicely organized into "Plats," "Accompagnements," Fromages & Desserts," and "Bases." The organization of the book displayed in the T of C at the front is less intuitive. Its major sections are "liberté," "fraternité," égalité," "la fortune," "démocratie," and "la raison." A two-page watercolor spread introduces each of these sections. A good example of the lovely photography comes on 33: never did flour, milk, butter, and eggs look so good! The matches of fables and recipes are often clever, as when OF with its blowout frog is matched with "soufflé aux champignons." After all, a soufflé is also something blown out. Rabier's OF on 34 is one of his best! The fable of WL is joined with a recipe for lamb hamburgers (44)! 2P and a beautiful soup toureen are presented together with two recipes for soup (64). Among the best photographs is one juxtaposing a vase and a shallow soupbowl (76), just across from FS. Pages 90-91 present a great spread of whipped cream, jam, a cake mold, and the cake that is fresh out of the mold. Yum! Romain's most arresting image is a two-page spread on "Le Petit Cirque" on 110-111. What does it have to do with anything here? This book is beautifully constructed.

2012 Aesop's Fables. Adapted by Jan Fields. Illustrated by Eric Scott Fisher. Hardbound. Edina, MN: Calico Illustrated Classics: Magic Wagon: ABDO Group. £14.71 from AwesomeBooks.com, June, '12.

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

2012 Aesop's Fables: 11 Leveled Stories to Read Together for Gaining Fluency & Comprehension. Kathryn Wheeler & Debra Olson Pressnall. Illustrations by Julie Anderson. Hardbound. Greensboro, North Carolina: Partner Read-Alouds: Key Education: Carson-Dellosa Publishing Company. £7.72 from AwesomeBooks.com, June, '12.

Here is a teacher's delight: well-prepared work engaging pairs of students at increasing levels of second grade reading to read a fable together. Each of the eleven sections has this pattern: a teacher's page; the text, with the two voices clearly marked; a page checking for understanding the details of the story; a page to help thinking about the story. The fables used here are well written; the authors have supplied a good deal of colorful detail. Thus "The Fox and the Goat" starts with the fox searching all day for water and asking help from a bird, who knows how tricky Tricky the fox is! The fables used are: "The Fox and the Goat"; "The Big Wish"; UP; "The Donkey and the Dog"; "Doctor Frog"; FS; DW; MM; DS; AD; and "The Fox and the Lion." "The Big Wish" tells of a sparrow who wanted to become a peacock -- and did! He soon regretted his choice. "The Fox and the Lion" touches on familiarity and respect. I think that the simple black-and-white illustrations along the way would help second graders relate to these stories. 

2012 Birds of a Feather Shop Together: Aesop's Fables for the Fashionable Set. Sandra Bark. Illustrations by Bil Donovan. First printing. Hardbound. NY: Harper Design. $13.44 from Amazon.com, Feb., '12.

This book is a delightful surprise. It takes some seventeen traditional Aesop's fables, told in the book's last pages. For each it spins out a new tale about fashion, shopping, and clothes. The watercolor (?) illustrations are splashy, colorful, and suggestive. For a taste, try "A Girl with Curls" (30) and "Bella and the Mouse" (38) for both text and illustration. The contemporary shopping stories translate the fables well. This book is worth showing off in a lecture on fables.

2012 Ellie's Golden Fables. Ellie Adel. Illustrated by Danielle Kluth. First edition. Paperbound. Cambridgeshire, UK: Melrose Books. £9.40 from AwesomeBooks.com, June, '12.

"These fables have been written at this specific point in time to assist those who are destined to transform or heal themselves by consciously creating change in the physical body by the spirit within" (v). Here are thirty stories, each centered on an Australian animal, and each beginning either with the phrase "I am the Spirit of" or the phrase "I am the Light of." I have read several. Each includes a "pourquoi" story, but there is also a good deal of analyzing and even preaching. The dodo let itself become extinct to try to lead Australians and Australian animals to peacefulness, even in the midst of very provocative lives. "Peacock" (17) tells of the estrangement of the formerly beloved and gracious peacock. Now he lives at odds with the hen; his vanity grates on her pride. "Green Frog" (76) points out that tadpoles are blind and argues that they trust in nature. Is it true that "whenever you hear a chorus of frogs you will know an initiation is taking place" (77)? Do "mature frogs gather to welcome the young frog into her new life"? Most of the stories seem to have a sense of the fall and of redemption. Creatures were peaceful but got into ugly selfishness and abuse of others. They either then made a comeback or tried to. They knew the unhappiness of provocation and confusion. The author favors the concept of "vibration" to describe life-forms. There are seven stirring colored illustrations along the way. 

2012 Fabeln aus aller Welt. Illustriert von Karsten Teich. Vorwort von Sybil Gräfin Schönfeldt. Erste Auflage. Hardbound. Berlin: Tulipan Verlag. €24.95 from Amazon.de, August, '12.

This is an impressive large-format book. It contains 110 fables. Impressive is the care at the book's end to list them in a T of C and an AI. There follows on 188 a list of sources, first for the fables whose authors are known and then for the fables whose authors are unknown. Finally there is a brief description of each of the known authors. These pages are done nicely in several colors. The book is impressive in its breadth of authors and sources and in its illustrations. Let me mention some of the best illustrations: the frightened hare about to commit suicide on 28-29; swan, pike, and crab pulling in different directions from different places on the pages (76-77); the anthropomorphic horse on 132-33 who has to carry the dead ass' burden and skin; and FC's artist (172-3). Among the briefest fables is "Ein Vergleich" by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (41), in which a molehill addresses a volcano, asking why he plays out his inner struggles before the whole world. "I have my own struggles, but who ever saw me spew out fire?" Novalis' "Das Pferd" with its poignant illustration raises the question of the price of enslavement (43). Grillparzer's "Diplomatischer Rat" makes a good point and is well illustrated (48-49). The marten asks the fox how to get hold of chickens. "Use force!" He uses force and drives the chickens right to the fox! A clever story, new to me, is attributed to Ivan Krylov: "Warum das Schwein weinte" (156), accompanied by another good illustration. People keep using "Schwein" as a put-down word, and the pig finally breaks down and cries. A little ass in the barn is sympathetic and asks why he is crying. He hears the whole story and then responds "Ja, das ist wirklich eine Schweinerei"! The last fable is presented as a "Nachwort": I take it to be a challenging reflection on compassion, again accompanied by a strong illustration. 

2012 Fables de Jean de La Fontaine. Illustrations de Sara. Hardbound. Collection Ivoire: Le Genévrier. €17 from Lecume des pages, Paris, July, '12.

Start with the back cover of this book. It contains two fascinating items. First there is an imaginary conversation between Sara and La Fontaine, where La Fontaine -- appropriately -- argues for the spiritual character of animals. Below that is a simple picture of a donkey looking at a bookstand featuring "Le Cheval et l"Ane." The medium here seems to be something like "torn paper silhouettes." Sara thus deals with blocks of uniformly colored material. The down-side of this method is that it allows for no shading of colors, no shadows, no interplay among various elements within a field of color. Each of twenty-two fables gets a two-page spread with these torn paper silhouettes. Among the best are "La lice et sa compagne"; "Le cheval et l'âne"; "Le chat, la belette et le petit lapin"; "L'âne et le chien"; and "Le chat et le renard." In this style of art, eyes give the artist his or her greatest chance of expression, I think.

2012 Fables for the Times. Henry Wallace Phillips. Illustrated by T.R. Sullivant (but there are no illustrations included). Paperbound. Lexington, KY: High Quality Paperback: Filiquarian Publishing. $9.99 from amazon.com, Jan., '12.

From the little research I have been able to do, it seems that I should know of Henry Wallace Phillips (1869 to 1930), who seems to have written short stories and film scripts, among other things. Might he have written for "The Times," most likely "The New York Times"? This is a disappointing scanned version of an 1896 book done by an on-demand press. After long searching, I still have not found the original press. The title-page includes "Illustrated by T.R. Sullivant" but there are no illustrations. The last page ends with this "Footnote 1: (editorial note) This was corrected from the original, which." End of quotation, end of book. Scanning machines, unaided and uncorrected, give us unintelligible books! Now that I have found the book copied on Project Gutenberg, I can relate that that sentence finishes "read: "Well, where's your art now, snarled the lion?"] One can also find the illustrations there. What we have here are twenty standard Aesopic or Aesopic-like fables cleverly turned to contemporary humorous purposes, often summed up in a clever proverbial "immoral." The book seems to me much in the spirit of Bierce, and that is a very clever spirit! In DS, the dog stopped to think about angles and refractions, decided that what he was seeing were "only optical phenomena," and "trotted on his way to Boston without further thought on the matter" (4). "A fox stood under an apple-tree and gazed up earnestly at the globes of yellow lusciousness. 'How sad, for the sake of an old-time piece of literature,' he said, 'that the fox is a carnivorous animal and doesn't care particularly about fruit!" (5). The fox said that with a voice the crow would rank with prima donnas. The crow dropped the meat on his head, blinded him, and pecked him viciously. She was distressed to be compared with "them shameless French singing hussies"! Moral: "Don't praise the soft whiteness of a labor delegate's hands" (6). The thirsty wolf asks the young lamb to bring him water. She does, with some knock-out drops in it (11)! Jupiter tells the bee that its sting will cost it its life, only to find the bee perched on his neck ready to sting and demanding that he reconsider (17). He does!

2012 Fables from the German of Mr Lessing. J. Richardson. Hardbound. York: C. Etherington/Eighteenth Century Collections Online Print Editions. See 1773/2012.

2012 Fables of La Fontaine. Illustrations by Félix Lorioux. Hardbound. Mineola, NY: Dover. $12.37 from Amazon.com, Dec., '12.

This is a beautiful inexpensive book, produced from what Dover calls an original 1927 edition. Bodemann guesses at a first edition of Lorioux by Hachette in 1921, and that is where I have put my first editions of Lorioux. As always, Dover does a lovely job. Six fables each get twelve illustrations. English translations are put below the few French verses included in each illustration. "La Cigale et la Fourmi," "Le Corbeau et le Renard," "Le Rat de Ville et le Rat des Champs," "Le Loup et l'Agneau," "Le Renard et la Cigogne," and "Le Héron." 

2012 Fábulas de Esopo: Fábulas recreadas en versos rimados. Luis Hernán Rodríguez Felder. Illustrations from Wenceslaus Hollar et al. Primera edición. Paperbound. Buenos Aires: Colección Clásicos: Literatura Infantil: Proyecto Larsen Clásicos. $26.13 from christian723 on eBay, Jan., '13.

As one sometimes finds in French books, the covers here wrap around and fold in a little over two inches. As the front cover proudly states, there are here 174 fables with morals. Each fable starts a new page. Many have simple clip-art illustrations of one of the animals named in the fable; others have small Hollar illustrations. Each fable is numbered. The rhymed verse is always split down the center, and texts are centered on the split. The back cover speaks of the special trick in this format: "una métrica dual, que permite leer las fábulas en versos largos, de 14 sílabas, o en versos más breves y ágiles, de 7 sílabas." I gather that one can read whole lines or just half lines and still find sense. The arrangement of fables is alphabetical, but beware: "El" counts. Thus Afrodita, Androcles, Bóreas, Diógenes, and "Dos hombres" come before all the "El" fables, starting with "El abeto" and "El adivino." The cover presents a conglomerate picture including a human figure with a donkey's head looking at a grasshopper and ant in front of a woodcut-like set of town buildings. There is a T of C at the back (217-21). 

2012 Fox Tails: Four Fables from Aesop. Amy Lowry. First edition, first printing. Dust-jacket. Hardbound. NY: Holiday House. $18.22 from Awesome Books, April, '12.

Similar to The Ant and the Grasshopper from the same artist and publisher in 2000. Like it, this large-format book is over 10" square. Amy Lowry (who was Amy Lowry Poole in 2000) cleverly weaves FG, FC, "The Fox and the Goat," and FS into a single dramatic tale. The stork invites those who were victimized in FC and "The Fox and the Goat" to watch as she gets even with the fox at dinner that evening. The two guests watch as the fox goes away muttering "Drat." Then the stork invites those two guests to sit down and enjoy the meal which the fox could not get at. I like best the picture of the two onlookers laughing in the background as the fox tries in vain to get some of the fine fish stew that the stork has put into tall jars. Another excellent illustration is the first: the hungry fox looks into an empty refrigerator. A final page offers good traditional morals for each of the four fables. Lowry's selection of the books on the fox's bookshelf is engaging. The list includes Anansi Tales, Trickster Tales, Volpone, Omelettes, and Chicken Recipes. Another delightful book!

2012 How to Tell a Fable. Suri Rosen. Various artists. Hardbound. St. Catherines, Ontario: Crabtree Publishing. $21.80 from abe books, Nov., '11.

This large-format hardbound book of 32 pages works from BW, "The Blue Jackal," and DS to demonstrate the elements of a fable and to invite young readers to do all sorts of things with fables, including conducting an interview in the pasture and creating a new fable. The viewpoint on fable is good throughout. As I write, this is the first book in the collection published in 2012. That is especially surprising because I received it in 2011!

2012 Rosinante's Sallies: Animal Fables for Adults.  As Told to Sally Netzel.  Illustrations by Liz Netzel.  Paperbound.  Lexington, KY: Xlibris.  See 2008/12.

2012 The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. After Dodsley. Illustrated by Paul Galdone. First printing thus. Dust-jacket. Hardbound. Boston/NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $8.99 from Tugooh Toys, Washington, DC, Oct., '12.

This new edition reproduces the original 1971 version by McGraw-Hill. The texts and illustrations are the same, but the format is different. The long horizontal illustrations now cover the pages from left to right, but there is considerable open space left over and under them, so that a book that was 10" wide and 7¼" high has now become about 8¼" square. As I wrote there, Galdone's work is lively. The text is after Dodsley, who presents this story as I, 30, "The Court and Country-Mouse." This version still changes Dodsley's female country mouse into a male, adds the court mouse's remonstration over country life and food, and adds finally the notion of the country mouse's considering overnight whether he will go to the city. "Wetting whiskers" in champagne is true to Dodsley. Galdone gives the country mouse a great smock. This edition continues the nice contrast between city and country in things like symbol and typeface. The lovely back-cover illustration of the two moving through the countryside is lost to an advertisement here. Finding this book in a favorite Georgetown toy store was a pleasant surprise. 

2012 12 Fabeln von Aesop. Nacherzählt von Renate Raecke. Mit Bildern von Ayano Imai. Hardbound. Bargteheide, Germany: Minedition: Michael Neugebauer. €13.95 from Bücher-Bender, Mannheim, August, '12.

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

2012 20 fábulas de La Fontaine. Celia Ruiz. Ilustrado por Marifé González. Hardbound. Madrid: ya LEO: Susaeta. $6.66 from Buy.com through eBay, April, '12.

This sturdy and engaging book gives Spanish reading children a great prose introduction to twenty of La Fontaine's best known fables with clear and specific morals. The migrant wolf on the cover makes a good symbol for the book; I would not immediately have recognized him as coming from DW, but he represents that wolf well, as does the picture of him in flight on 25. Here, as generally, Susaeta is cute and engaging. TMCM gets shaped up in unique fashion. A whole mouse family lives in the city, with only an uncle still living out of town. A nephew telephones this uncle and invites him to join the whole family for a city feast. There is on 35 a great image of the uncle hustling away with his cane and suitcase. González here takes a good approach to presenting the cat as a sack of grain just outside of the mouse hole (46). The frantic pig who senses that he is going to give more than milk or wool is delightfully portrayed (58-61). Well done! 

2012 200 Aesop's Fables: Favourite Fables to Share. Compiled by Vic Parker. Illustrations by Frank Endersby, Marco Furlotti, Natalie Hinrichsen, Tamsin Hinrichsen, Jan Lewis, and Marcin Piwowarski. First printing. Hardbound. Essex, UK: Miles Kelly. $12.02 from Kenny's Bookshop, Galway, Ireland, Dec., '12.

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

 

end

To top