The Blue Fairy Book

The first of Andrew Lang's coloured fairy books: Perrault, Grimm, Norse and Arabian tales gathered for the nursery in plain English, from Beauty and the Beast to Aladdin, Snow White and the Terrible Head. Lang was a folklorist arguing with anthropologists by day; the collections were assembled largely by his wife Leonora and a team of women translators he credited too lightly. It sold out at once and set the shape of the fairy-tale book for the next century. Twenty-two plates of landscape and story painting by Constable, Grimshaw and others, 1800 to 1894, give the tales the older world they came from.