The Arthur Rackham Fairy Book PDF
Preview The Arthur Rackham Fairy Book
The Rackham Arthur mm * j Classics illustrated with sixty-one color and black and white plates m r^^ IP* ki 9 *. 3 The ArthurRackham BOOK FAIRY Twenty-three renowned stories Eight full-color plates fifty-three black and white illustrations Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) wasone of the greatest illustrators of any age. His specialty was the magic he loved to create to accompany the classic tales that delight us through all the ages ofour lives. In TheArthurRackham Fairy Book he has illustrated the greatest of those tales. Here are "Jack and the Beanstalk," "Beauty and the Beast," "Sinbad the Sailor," "The Ugly Duckling," "Aladdin," "Sleeping Beauty," "Ali Baba," "Cinderella," "The Emperor's New Clothes," "Rip Van Winkle," "Red Riding Hood," "Hansel and Gretel,"andelevenothers. "Old favourites of the nursery," Rackham called them, "that have such a hold on our affections that their incidents, characters, and even phrases have become part of our everyday thought and expression, and help to shape our lives. "There's no doubt that we should be behav- ing ourselves very differently if Beauty had neverbeen unitedwith herBeast,orSirRichard Whittington listened to the bells. Or if Sister Anne hadn't seen anybody coming, or if 'Open Sesame!' hadn't cleared the way, or Sinbad sailed." ThankstoArthur Rackham,they live forever in line and color on these pages. THE ARTHUR. RACKHAM FAIK.Y BOOK Cl^SSlCS ILLUSTRATED WITH. Om SIXTY- COLOR& BLACK-AND-WHITEPLATES WeATRERU\NE KooKS ]tf£W Y&RIC • Copyright MCMLXXVIIIbyCrown Publishers,Inc. LibraryofCongressCatalogCardNumber: 77-82092 All rightsreserved. Thiseditionispublished byWeathervaneBooks aadbivcisidoneoffIgmphrintSociety,Inc.,distributed byCrown Publishers,Inc. ILLUSTRATOR'S PREFACE FOR this book I have gone to those old favourites of the nursery that have such a hold on our affections that their incidents, characters, and even phrases have become part of our everyday thought and expression, and help to shape our lives. There's no doubt that we should be behaving ourselves very differently if Beauty had never been united to her Beast, or Sir Richard Whittington listened to the bells. Or if Sister Anne hadn't seen anybody coming; or if "Open Sesame!" hadn't cleared the way, or Sindbad sailed. It is convenient to call them all fairy-tales, though some have very little of the magical or even fantastic about them. Most of them had a long and eventful life of oral tradition before somebody who could write caught them as they flew and consigned them to cold print. And even then they have often since been embroidered or trimmed to suit the special circumstances of their telling. Others have been so beautifully told and so mingled with the story-teller's own creations that no one yet has wished to improve or edit a single word. Ofsuch are Andersen's. The traditional English tales, like Jack the Giant-killer, too often unfortu- nately fared rather badly, falling into uninspired hands when first written down, yet in other respects they compare well Now with the best. and then some one-time famous story drops out. Itis true, forinstance, that the purse ofFortunatus is still a household word; but his own history is no longer current, and I felt thathe andhis "old gentleman called Loch- Fitty, who was a native of Scotland," might be left out of my list. How different from Shacabac's generous but eccen- tric "old gentleman" named Barmecide! If descendants of THE ARTHUR RACKHAM FAIRY BOOK that honoured family no longer survive, so much the worse for Bagdad. And now, in our own day, inspired story-tellers go on adding original characters to the stock—an Alice, a Peter Pan, and a Mr Toad. It is impossible not to believe that in time even these exalted personages will gather legends round their beloved heads, for surely they are too full of life not to grow. Yet another sort of story is still coming to per- fectionin the development ofthenot unfamiliarkind offolk- tale, often ofmainly antiquarian or ethnological interest, but so glorified in the very manner of its retelling as to rank as great literary creation. One can hardly conceive of Brer Rabbit's adventures in any other words than those of our revered Uncle Remus. In the Contents the main source of each story is given when possible, though some came to us from more countries than one, and the versions that we are most attached to are 'varieties,' as a gardener would call them, produced by our own soil and climate. The illustrations are new and have never been published before, though in the case ofseveral ofthe stories this is not the first time that it has fallen to my lot to illustrate them, in the thirty years and more that my work has led me through enchanted lands. A.R. /**—>v. CONTENTS THE ARTHUR RACKHAM FAIRY BOOK
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