This fantastical Folio edition of Diana Wynne Jones’s enchanting tale features artwork by Folio’s 2019 Book Illustration Competition winner.
The Roald Dahl Collection (Set 1)
James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Twits
Illustrated by Quentin Blake
Introduced by Donald Sturrock
Grab your golden ticket for three of Roald Dahl’s finest fizz-whizzing adventures – James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Twits – in this splendiferous new Folio Society set, featuring Quentin Blake’s iconic black-and-white illustrations and the classic texts.
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‘If my books can help children become readers, then I feel I have accomplished something important’
- Roald Dahl
Are you ready to experience Roald Dahl’s weird and wonderful razzwizzling adventures? With a cast of rumbunctious characters that includes a ‘great big greedy nincompoop’, a couple of ‘grumpy old grunions’ and a spiteful aunt who is like a ‘great white soggy overboiled cabbage’, these delightfully darksome stories are full of gruesome goings-on and raucous retribution. The first set in a gorgeous new Folio series, these cloth-bound editions of perennial favourites James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Twits will delight adults and children alike. Each book is beautifully illustrated with every one of Quentin Blake’s brilliantly imagined black-and-white drawings, while the bindings feature iconic characters from the stories. Dahl’s biographer Donald Sturrock introduces the books, which are presented in a screen-printed slipcase with a design that will complement the series.
The Roald Dahl Collection (Set 2) is also available and includes The BFG, The Witches and Matilda.
‘Whipped cream isn’t whipped cream at all if it hasn’t been whipped with whips, just like poached eggs isn’t poached eggs unless it’s been stolen in the dead of the night.’
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Bound in screen-printed cloth
Set in Baskerville
Vol 1 (James): 168 pages, Vol 2 (Charlie): 192 pages, Vol 3 (Twits): 96 pages
Black-and-white illustrations integrated with text throughout all volumes (154 in total)
Metallic printed endpapers
Ribbon markers
Screen-printed cloth slipcase
Book size: 9˝ x 5¾˝
Quentin Blake’s quirky ink drawings are so intrinsically linked to Roald Dahl’s madcap stories that no other artwork was considered for this new collector’s set. Instead, all of Blake’s illustrations have been carefully reproduced in their original black-and-white format and integrated with the text. Memorable characters bound across the screen-printed cloth bindings, while the striking metallic endpapers are decorated with motifs inspired by the stories. This first set in our new series is the perfect introduction – or nostalgic return – to Dahl’s magical and menacing worlds and we enlisted the help of Donald Sturrock to advise on the selection. Artistic Director of the Roald Dahl Foundation, as well as the author of the first authorised biography of Roald Dahl, Sturrock also wrote our exclusive new introduction, which is a fascinating insight into the novelist’s professional and family life.
When Dahl suffered writer’s block on a collection of short stories for adults, his agent suggested he switch to children’s fiction and urged him to ‘re-indulge yourself in the realm of fantasy writing at which you are so very good’. With his evil characters, fantastical settings and a genuine threat of danger at every turn, Dahl bucked the literary trend at the time for moral education and wrote stories that children wanted to hear and read – again and again. From his first children’s book, James and the Giant Peach, adapted from a bedtime tale he told his own children, Dahl went on to become one of the most successful authors of all time, with the likes of Aunts Sponge and Spiker, Augustus Gloop, Willy Wonka and Muggle-Wump still firing young imaginations sixty years later.