Aesop's Fables > Books of Fables > Series Books > Thai Bilingual Pamphlets

Thai Bilingual Pamphlets

82 pamphlets, each 4" x5.5", thirty-two pages in length joined by one staple to a cardboard cover, in seven series of twelve books each. The publisher is indicated, if at all, in Thai. Apparently no date of publication is given. There is an identical title on each in Thai in seven letters at the upper left of the front cover and again on the top of the title-page. 10 Baht each by mail from D.K. Siam Square, Bangkok, June and October, '95. (The rough equivalency at the time was about $.42.)

Each series has a characteristic color as background for that overall title. Only in Series 7 does the picture of the whole series on the back cover include this colored background for the overall title; in the coloring and configuration of the booklet's particular title there is also a frequent discrepancy between front covers and the pictures of front covers as they appear on the back covers. The picture for Series 1 uses the actual cover picture of the booklet I have for only one picture (LM, #0660004) out of the twelve! The picture for Series 2 is apparently unique in representing its members in numerical order. The title pages are similar but vary the color of their background stripes.

At least from our point of view, there are significant problems with spelling, tense, agreement, and punctuation. Note, for example, the arbitrary capitalization in titles; I have tried here to reproduce the titles exactly as they are found on the title-pages. (Series 7 deals with that problem by doing its first six and last three titles entirely in capitals!) The narration throughout tends to be in the present tense. The watercolor (?) illustrations are lively. The inside of the back cover lists important vocabulary words.

In a first order, $20 worth of books ended up costing $65 because we needed a bank order and air mail postage; the latter resulted in the books coming after about two months. I thought there were two series and asked for them. The dealer included a book each from Series 4 and Series 6 besides sending all of Series 1 and almost all of Series 5. A second order for another $60 brought another 59 books, now two short of the total of 84. So far a third order for those last two has not found response from the dealer.

Booklets of which I have an extra copy are marked with [x].

There is one out-of-series booklet, a gift of my favorite private collector, perhaps done in an earlier pilot set, now included in Set 3: "The Fox and the Monkey." It cost only 7 Baht, while all others cost 10 Baht. Its cover lacks the colored background for the series title; the Thai and English titles are differently arranged, and there is no series number (#0660025 on the later version). The inside cover is blank, whereas the later version has several lines of print, including an ISBN number. The title page does not include colored striping and has less information than the later version does. The back cover advertises Series 5, of which this booklet is apparently not part; amazingly, though, it pictures all the members of Series 5 in order, while the back covers of Series 5 as I have it picture the members out of order.

The seven series are marked by a specific color within a certain range of numbers, and that is the way I have sorted them here: