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Folio’s Festive Classics

Celebrate Christmas with The Folio Society’s Festive Classics collection, featuring The Night Before Christmas, The Nutcracker and A Christmas Carol. Beautifully illustrated and bound, these enchanting editions capture the warmth and wonder of the holiday season, making them perfect for cosy, fireside reading and timeless festive traditions.

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‘Your Christmas Eve now has a new tradition!’
  1. Mandy Kirkby, Editor

The Folio Society’s Festive Classics collection brings together three magical tales that perfectly capture the very spirit of the holiday season. 

The Night Before Christmas
Clement C. Moore’s The Night Before Christmas delights with its timeless verse of St. Nicholas and his sleigh, illustrated in rich, nostalgic colour by Ella Beech. With its glow-in-the-dark cover and fold-out pages, this edition brims with the wonder of Christmas Eve.

The Nutcracker
New to Folio in 2024 is The Nutcracker by Alexandre Dumas. This weird and wonderful Christmas classic, where toys and treats spring to life, is magically reimagined by Taylor Dolan’s whimsical illustrations. Complete with a beautiful peekaboo slipcase this edition is a fresh and modern twist on a festive favourite.

A Christmas Carol
Rounding out the collection is A Christmas Carol. Charles Dicken’s ultimate Christmas tale is given the Folio treatment, as Scrooge’s journey from miser to merrymaker unfolds amongst the beautiful black-and-white illustrations by Michael Foreman.

Together, this collection offers the ultimate Christmas experience, sparking joy and maybe even a new festive tradition for the whole family.

See individual titles for production details:

The Night Before Christmas

The Nutcracker

A Christmas Carol

 

About Clement C. Moore

Clement C. Moore was born and lived in New York City, where he was a prominent landowner and local figure. After studying at what is now Columbia University he was active as a real estate developer, helping to create the city’s Chelsea neighbourhood – it was open countryside owned by Moore until the 1820s. Today a park in Chelsea is named after him. Moore was also a professor of Oriental and Greek history at a theological college in New York, and served as a trustee of Columbia for several decades, but today is far better known for The Night Before Christmas, published anonymously in 1823 in the New York Sentinel and only acknowledged by Moore two decades later, claiming that he had written it to amuse his children for Christmas in 1822.

About Ella Beech

Ella Beech is an artist and illustrator who studied fine art before working as a designer and art director in children’s publishing for 20 years. Having completed a postgraduate degree in children’s book illustration at Cambridge School of Art, she is now an associate lecturer on the same course, as well as a freelance illustrator. She works in traditional media, experimenting with bold compositions and a twist of offbeat humour in her work. She was highly commended in the Macmillan Prize for Illustration in 2022 and was a finalist in the Bologna Illustrators Exhibition in 2021.

About Alexandre Dumas père

Alexandre Dumas père (1802–1870) was a bestselling French author whose works still enjoy global renown and are frequently adapted for film, TV, and other media. Dumas grew up in Picardy in northern France and, as a young man, went to Paris, where he worked for the future king, Louis-Philippe, but was quickly diverted by the theatre: his dramas, often with historical settings, were hugely popular. From the 1840s, he concentrated on fiction; his novels such as The Three Musketeers (1844, Folio 2001) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1846, Folio 1999) – romantic, exciting, and colourful – sold in large numbers in France and in translation. In 2002, Dumas’s ashes were reinterred in the Panthéon in Paris – a symbol of the belated recognition of his greatness.

About E.T.A. Hoffmann

E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) was one of the major authors of the Romantic period in Germany. His extraordinarily innovative writings include a satirical novel purporting to be the autobiography of a cat, as well as the tales of fantasy and horror for which he is best known today, such as The Sandman (1816) and the fairy tale Undine (1816). Hoffmann also composed instrumental and vocal music and wrote a number of librettos for opera and musical drama. Brought up in Prussia, he lived for periods in Warsaw, Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden, employed as a clerk in the state service and repeatedly forced to move by disruption caused by the Napoleonic Wars. He died of syphilis in Berlin, aged 46.

About Taylor Dolan

Taylor Dolan is a freelance illustrator living in Galway, Ireland. She completed a Master’s in Children’s Book Illustration at the Cambridge School of Art in 2018. Dolan’s illustrations have been commissioned by HarperCollins, Levi’s, Scoop magazine and hitrecord.org, and her work has been exhibited in London, Edinburgh, Paris and Nanjing. Having studied theatre from the age of seven and performed in over 40 productions, including the Emmy-winning HitRECord on TV, Dolan brings theatre expertise as well as her distinctive style to her illustrations. Her previous Folio Society commission was for The Phantom of the Opera (2019).​

About Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born in 1812 in Landport, England. His family moved to London in 1816, and then to Chatham in 1817, where Dickens spent the happiest years of his childhood. They returned to London in 1822, and two years later Dickens’s father was imprisoned for debt. Dickens was sent to work in a shoe-polish factory – a period that would come to influence much of his later writing. In 1833 he began contributing stories and essays to newspapers and magazines, and The Pickwick Papers, his first commercial success, was serialised in 1836. He went on to complete 15 novels – including Oliver Twist (1838), A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1861) – all now considered classics of English literature, and became a celebrity in America as well as in Britain. He also established, edited and regularly contributed to the journals Household Words (1850–9) and All the Year Round (1859–70). Dickens died in 1870; he is buried in Westminster Abbey.

About Michael Foreman

Michael Foreman was born in Suffolk in 1938 and grew up near Lowestoft. He studied at Lowestoft Art School, and at St Martin's School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, and his first children's book was published while he was still a student. After leaving college, Foreman travelled widely, making films and television commercials, and working as an art lecturer, before becoming a full-time author and illustrator. As well as illustrating books by Dickens, Shakespeare, the Brothers Grimm, Roald Dahl and Rudyard Kipling, Foreman also writes and illustrates his own books, War Boy: A Country Childhood (1989) and After The War Was Over (1995), which was shortlisted for a Kate Greenaway Medal and won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize in 1993. Other publications include The Littlest Dinosaur's Big Adventure (2009), A Child's Garden: A Story of Hope (2009) and The Tortoise and the Soldier (2015).

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