The Blue Fairy Book

428 pp. Stories gathered from around the world--most of them old favorites: "Sleeping Beauty," "Rumpelstiltskin," "Cinderella," "The Arabian Nights," and 33 more. Includes color frontispiece and black-and-white illustrations throughout text. Andrew Lang's Fairy Books or Andrew Lang's "Coloured" Fairy Books constitute a twelve-book series of fairy tale collections. Although Andrew Lang did not collect the stories himself from the oral tradition, the extent of his sources, who had collected them originally (with the notable exception of Madame d'Aulnoy), made them an immensely influential collection, especially as he used foreign-language sources, giving many of these tales their first appearance in English. As acknowledged in the prefaces, although Lang himself made most of the selections, his wife and other translators did a large portion of the translating and telling of the actual stories. The Blue Fairy Book assembled a wide range of tales, with seven from the Brothers Grimm, five from Madame d'Aulnoy, three from the Arabian Nights, and four Norse stories, among other sources."