The Blue Fairy Book

Andrew Lang

Enable Book Zoom Add to Wish List

Published price: US$ 84.95

Add to basket

Click image to enlarge

Introduced by Joan Aiken.

Colour illustrations and drawings by Charles van Sandwyk.

Bound in full cloth blocked in four colours with a design by the artist.

Set in Founder's Caslon, with a hand-drawn title page.

Reviews
Text:
Binding:
Illustrations:
Rating:	3/5 from 2 Reviews

About this book
Reviews

The Blue Fairy Book

This wonderful collection of fairy stories, put together by Andrew Lang at the end of the 19th century, gathers many of the best loved tales of childhood - 'Old stories', Lang calls them in his preface, 'that have pleased so many generations'. They include the best of the English tradition, favourites from Grimm, Perrault, The Arabian Nights and Gulliver's Travels, as well as lesser-known tales and new re-tellings, such as Lang's own 'The Terrible Head' based on the Greek myth of Perseus and the Gorgon. Reared on border ballads told by his old nurse, Lang was reading by the age of four and devoured 'every fairy tale I could lay my hands on'. He was enthralled by trolls and witches, and stories of changelings and devilish hunts. Later the tales of Shakespeare, Homer and Dickens were to fire his imagination.

The Blue Fairy Book - so popular in its day that it went on to launch a series - has all the ingredients one would expect: the bewitched and the beautiful, the fearful and the brave. The good are as truehearted as they are fair, as heroic as they are handsome, but not everyone lives happily ever after, and even the prettiest of princesses cannot be happy if she forgets to keep her word.

Also available:

Read more about the life and work of Andrew Lang

To post a review for The Blue Fairy Book
you will need an active online account.

Review by loryh0907 on 18th Mar 2013

Text:

Illustrations:

Binding:

Rating:

"I was disappointed in the Blue Fairy Book. The book is too large and thick to hold comfortably; there are too few illustrations (there should be at least one for every story, as with the old HJ Ford e..." [read more]

Review by loalq on 25th Aug 2012

Text:

Illustrations:

Binding:

Rating:

"Gorgeous edition of Lang's Fairy Books. The one major disappointment is the REALLY small number of illustrations, definitively not enough for a book on this series. Going sometimes 30 plus pages witho..." [read more]