Monday 21 January 2008

Fairy Tales

There are three beautiful books about fairy tales published by "Edition Axel Menges". The first one (which I discovered by incident and which led to further investigations on that topic) is a collection of Fairy Tales written by Oscar Wilde. The illustrations are very nice and also the stories are interesting - the fairy tales belong more to the genre "literary fairy tales" than to the anonymously passed down folktales. Overall a good idea, which has been realised very well!!

Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 in Dublin, the son of a physician and writer who, among other things, left a book about Jonathan Swift; his mother wrote poems and was an authority on Celtic folklore. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and later at Magdalen College, Oxford. As a student, already an enthusiastic follower of Walter Pater, he began to lead a life completely shaped by aesthetic premises. Typical of this attitude is Pater's statement: To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

author: oscar wilde
publisher:
edition axel menges


Edition Axel Menges also offers two other books on Fairy Tales, in this case more traditional. The first one is a collection of Fairy Tales written by Hans Christian Andersen (including also some of his famous stories), and the other book is full of stories by the Brothers Grimm. The illustrations are also well done, especially the book with the fairy tales by H.C. Andersen.

So, if you like Fairy Tales at all, you should really give the one or the other of these books a try!





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