Andersens Fairy Tales, Childrens Classics, Red Cloth, c. 1961–1968

The Piece

Andersen's Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen, with an introduction by William T. Atwood, illustrated by Frederick Richardson and color illustrations by Donald E. Cooke, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, in the series The Children's Classics. Scarlet cloth over boards.

The front is stamped in gilt with two heads in profile, a boy behind a girl, both looking the same way, above a single heavy gilt rule that runs off the edge of the board. Nothing else. The spine does the work: The Children's Classics at the head over a gilt starburst, then a panel of teal blue carrying a winged sprite seated on a scroll with a wand throwing light, then the title in gilt capitals, with gilt rules banding it top and bottom. Red and teal and gold, and it reads from across a room.

The title page faces Richardson's pen frontispiece: the old King in his crown and ermine, lantern raised, opening the town gate into slanting rain while two attendants shrink behind him. The caption sends you to page 137, which is The Real Princess. Richardson's line is dense and fine, crosshatched the way newspaper illustration was drawn in his day, with the fur and the stonework worked out stroke by stroke.

Cooke's color plates are a different century. At page 214, inside The Marsh King's Daughter, the girl Helga rides bareback through a herd of wild horses with a storm stacking up behind the trees, painted loose and bright in blue, orange and white, signed DON in the lower corner.

Twenty five tales: The Snow Queen, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, The Wild Swans, The Swineherd, The Little Mermaid, The Candles, The Flying Trunk, The Ugly Duckling, The Emperor's New Clothes, Great Claus and Little Claus, The Nightingale, The Traveling Companion, The Real Princess, The Bell, The Storks, The Bottle Neck, Thumbelisa, Old Shut-Eye, The Marsh King's Daughter, Hans Clodhopper, The Garden of Paradise, The Tinderbox, The Flax, The Last Dream of the Old Oak and The Blue Mountains.

History & Provenance

Hans Christian Andersen was born at Odense on 2 April 1805, the son of a shoemaker and a washerwoman. At eleven he was working in a cloth factory and then a tobacco factory, and he was apprenticed to a shoemaker before he left Odense at fourteen for Copenhagen to try to become an actor. He published his first collection of Eventyr in 1835. He died on 4 August 1875 at Rolighed, outside Copenhagen. The tales in this volume are the ones that outlasted everything else he wrote.

Frederick Richardson, whose drawings these are, was born in Chicago in 1862 and died in New York on 15 January 1937. He trained at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts and the Académie Julian in Paris, went to work for the Chicago Daily News in 1892, drew the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 and was sent back to Paris to cover the Exposition Universelle of 1900. He taught seven years at the Art Institute of Chicago. He illustrated L. Frank Baum's Queen Zixi of Ix, worked extensively for the Chicago publisher P. F. Volland, and carried a strong Art Nouveau influence through everything he did. The 1926 copyright on the illustrations in this book is his.

Donald E. Cooke supplied the color plates. He is credited on the title page and he signed the paintings DON. The two sets of pictures sit about thirty five years apart and the book does not try to reconcile them, which is part of its character.

On the date. Holt, Rinehart and Winston was formed in 1960 out of Henry Holt and Company, Rinehart and Company of New York, and the John C. Winston Company of Philadelphia, so the imprint on this title page cannot predate that year. The copyright line reads 1926, 1957 and 1961, and the Library of Congress card number is 61-8854. There is no printing statement, and the series stayed in production through the decade, so 1961 is a floor and the upper end of the range given here is an estimate.

One line on the copyright page is worth noticing: Made especially for J. G. Ferguson Publishing Company. This was produced for a subscription or premium series rather than for the bookstore trade, which is why the binding is better than a shop edition of the same period would be.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is the soundest book in the group and it should be sold on that. Everything else that has come through lately has a split spine or a loose board. This one is tight, square, clean inside, with the gilt still bright and the red cloth holding its color.

Red and gold with a teal spine panel is a combination you cannot buy new, and the spine is designed to be seen rather than merely lettered. It stacks, it shelves, it holds a shelf of mixed colors together, and nothing about it says nineteen sixties until you open it.

Inside it carries two generations of American illustration in one volume. Richardson was drawing for the Chicago Daily News in 1892 and his pen work here is the tail end of that tradition. Cooke is painting in the flat bright manner of mid century children's books. Set the frontispiece against the plate at page 214 and you can watch the whole craft change. For a child's room, a reading shelf, or anyone who collects illustrated fairy tales, it earns its place and it will survive being handled.