On postmodern picturebooks, see Lawrence R. Sipe and Sylvia Pantaleo (eds.), Postmodern Picturebook (...)

That Sendak should gravitate to such a project is rather unsurprising. His strong opinions on allowing children to experience the darker elements of life through storytelling were rooted in an early admiration for the Brothers Grimm, who remained an influence throughout his career. He was also not only a lifelong reader, writer, and dedicated lover of books, but also a public champion of literature through his magnificent series of posters celebrating libraries and reading. The Poor Miller’s Boy and the Little Cat The Goblins Bearskin The Goblins Originally from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Corryn received her Bachelor’s degree from Juniata College, and then completed two Master’s degrees in Great Britain at the University of Aberystwyth and the University of Aberdeen. Genres

Perhaps more than anything else, this respect for children’s inherent intelligence and their ability to sit with difficult emotions is what makes the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm so enduringly enchanting. In their original conception, they broke with convention in other ways as well — rather than moralistic or didactic, they were beautifully blunt and unaffected, celebratory of poetry’s ennobling effect on the spirit. The brothers wrote in the preface to the first edition in 1812 that the storytelling between the covers was intended “to give pleasure to anyone who could take pleasure in it.”

Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales , New York, Tha (...) Neil Gaiman thinks a great deal, and with great insight, about what makes stories last. It is hardly surprising, then, that the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm would bewitch his imagination both as a storyteller and as a philosopher of storytelling. More than a decade after the publication of his widely beloved book Coraline, Gaiman brings this spirit of dark delight to his magnificent adaptation of the Grimm classic Hansel & Gretel ( public library). Chapbooks were small, affordable forms of literature for children and adults that were sold on the streets, and covered a range of subjects from fairy tales and ghost stories to news of politics, crime or disaster.” Ruth Richardson, “Chapbooks,” Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians, British Library, May 15, 2014, https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/chapbooks. Most recent: The complete color illustrations all her three published books have been added to Virginia Frances Sterrett.These art images include Doré's illustrations to The Divine Comedy, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Perrault's Fairy Tales, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, Contes Drolatiques, Fables de La Fontaine, Tennyson's Elaine, and others. The story “Red Riding Hood” does involve a heroine’s journey, but it too puts a twist in the self-discovery angle. Though the basic plot of the story is centuries older than any published form, Charles Perrault released the first definitive version, “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge,” in the fairy-tale compendium Histoires ou Contes du temps passé. Avec des Moralitez, published in France in 1697 and in the United States in 1729 (as Histories, or Tales from Past Times). To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the tales in 1973, exactly a decade after Where the Wild Things Are transformed Maurice Sendak from an insecure young artist into a household name, FSG invited the 45-year-old artist to illustrate a translation of the Grimm classics by novelist Lore Segal. Sendak had first envisioned the project in 1962, just as he was completing Where the Wild Things Are, but it had taken him a decade to begin drawing. He collaborated with Segal on choosing 27 of the 210 tales for this special edition, which was originally released as a glorious two-volume boxed set and was reprinted thirty years later in the single volume The Juniper Tree: And Other Tales from Grimm ( public library).

Figure 14: Kay Nielsen, Illustration for La Belle au Bois Dormant by Charles Perrault, 1913, Ink and watercolor on paper Although the 1936 illustrations for the Grimm tales by Wanda Gág are not necessarily the most visually captivating by contemporary standards, they are perhaps the most culturally significant for a number of reasons. Gág was a pioneering artist, author, printmaker, translator, and entrepreneur, who began her life in poverty as an incredibly precocious child. By the time she was eleven, she was running a successful business selling her art to feed her seven siblings after their father’s death. By her early twenties, she was one of only twelve young artists in the entire United States to receive a scholarship to New York’s legendary Art Students League, at the time the country’s most important art school. She was soon making a living as a successful commercial artist, supporting herself by illustrating fashion magazines and painting lampshades, and even became a partner in a toy company. She would go on to be a major influence for such storytelling legends as Maurice Sendak. For more than two centuries the stories have been a familiar part of the fabric of popular culture and literature. There have been countless editions, variations, and film adaptations. Mayfair-born William Roger Snow (1834-1907) went up to Cambridge in 1854 but by 1855 had left the university and signed up to the British Army. During his 20 years of soldiering he served all over the world while still finding time to publish books and plays and to paint. In 1875 he left the army under a cloud after an affair with a Dublin actress.On iconographic traditions in fairy-tale illustrations, see Ruth Bottigheimer, “Iconographic Contin (...)

Toy Books were short, inexpensive children’s books popular during the Victorian era. Edmund Evans revolutionized the market for Toy Books when he hired Walter Crane, and began producing very large print runs for the first editions, often more than 10,000. Accompanying Gaiman’s beautiful words, which speak to the part of the soul that revels in darkness but is immutably drawn to the light, are befittingly beautiful illustrations by Italian graphic artist Lorenzo Mattotti— the talent behind Lou Reed’s adaptation of The Raven. Figure 10: Edward Lear, “There was a young lady whose bonnet…” The Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear, 1861, Ink on paper, 21 x 29 cm, Houghton Library, Harvard University

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, German Popular Stories , translated from the Kinder and Haus Märchen collected by M.M. Grimm, from the Oral Tradition , trans. Edgar Taylor, illus. George Cruikshank, London, C. Baldwyn, 1823. See Joyce Irene Whalley and Tessa Rose Chester, A History of Children’s Book Illustration , London, John Murray with the Victoria & Albert Museum, 1988, 42 f. But the challenge is precisely what captivated Tan. He found himself suddenly transported to his own childhood — a time when he was obsessed not with painting and drawing but with the imaginative materiality of sculpture. His long-lost love for clay, papier mache, and soapstone was reawakened and magically fused with his longtime interest in Inuit and Aztec folk art. In this blog post we will delve into the library’s rare books collection to look at how some of the leading book illustrators of the late 19th and early 20th centuries interpreted the fairy tale world of the Brothers Grimm. All titles pictured are Homerton College Library’s own copies and all are first editions unless otherwise stated in the photo captions. Walter Crane, 1882 Grimm’s Household Stories [833 GRI(GHS)] Tan was at first reluctant — he had toyed with the idea of illustrating fairy tales over the years and had invariably ended up convinced that these highly abstract masterworks of storytelling, abloom at the intersection of the weird and the whimsical, didn’t lend themselves to representational imagery. In fact, Pullman himself notes this in the introduction, remarking on the flatness of the Grimms’ characters and the two-dimensional, cardboard-cutout-like illustrations of the early editions, which served as mere decoration and did little to enhance the storytelling experience.