Colored Fairy Books

All the fairy tales a girl could read

Samantha here.  In the realm of old fashioned back-to-school reading, we also have a brand new set of fairy tale books.  All 12 of the Andrew Lang's Colored Fairy books were published between 1899 through 1913.  They're perfectly in period for any Edwardian through modern day doll.  (The human has a matching set published by Dover, and you can read all the stories online at gutenberg.org.)

The first one was the Blue Fairy Book, that had all the 'traditional' stories like Cinderella (the Charles Perrault version, not the Grimms Brothers version, and don't get us started on the evolution of the Cinderella story.  The human wrote a paper on it once upon a time.)  That was followed by the Red, Green, and Yellow fairy books.

Rather pretty spine art

We tried to get books with the original first edition covers.  I'm sure they dust jackets originally, but a century later, not even the internet can find them, so we'll have to settle for the colored 'cloth' (by which we mean paper) bindings.

The books covered fairy tales from all over the world, including some rather obscure stories from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.  So not just the common western European stories.  Our favorite story is 'The Girl who Pretended to be a Boy' from the Violet Fairy Book.  And all the Japanese stories from the Pink Fairy Book.

As always, the insides have readable text and images.  These books a little thicker than usual at 48 pages each.  The original books came with both black-and-white images and full color ones.  Well, the later ones came with full color images.  The Blue Fairy Book only had black-and-white.

And, of course, because we are feeling generous and because people need something to read over Labor Day weekend, here's the Blue Fairy Book.  The entire collection can be purchased here.

The Blue Fairy Book

Instructions