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vcmwWe stopped yesterday at a used bookstore outside of Middlebury, VT, that I had been eyeing but had not had time to stop at on our previous drives south on Route 7. It was twisty and full of amusingly odd collectible books, and had very delightful non-fiction, cartooning, and poetry sections, as well as a mass of children's picture books (alphabetical by illustrator! odd yet charming - I can see where if you're collecting old ones it might be the artist you're after).
And on a shelf in the children's section, they had 16 titles from Time Life's The Enchanted World series.
I squeeed, asked the proprietor if I could get a cut rate per title if I bought them all. The answer was yes. So now I have 16 of these, and some are ones I'd read before, and some are ones I've never seen before. I'm sure I could Google it, but I don't actually know how many titles were in the series. I am having to work hard to resist the urge to hole up with a gallon of cocoa and not come out till spring.
I'm realizing with a combination of embarrassment and joy what a huge percentage of the folklore that Really Really Stuck from my childhood came from these books. Also, how deeply I imprinted on the art selections contained inside.
The beautiful inset picture story for Tam Lin; the explanation of Thor and Loki's visit to the hall of the giants; stuff about Vanamoinen; stuff about Taliesin; many, many beautifully illustrated versions of classic Grimm fairy tales; Gawain and the Green Knight; herblore; the tale of Faust and his deal with Mephistopheles. These books were for me what the Andrew Lang collections were for some other people. Mostly European and classic (i.e. Greek/Roman) in inclusion, there were also a smattering of Egyptian/Russian/Chinese/Japanese/Indian stories and lore scattered in. I don't recall much of any stuff from non-Meditteranean bits of Africa or from North or South America, which I recall looking back as pretty standard inclusion/exclusion patterns for most of the stuff I saw as a kid - and wasn't something I noticed as a kid since then all the stories were new to me.
Then there's the art, which ranges from appealing to competent to outstanding to classic. What they did here was to get reprint rights on a ton of the Victorian/Edwardian picture book classics, and also on a bunch of the more widely known pre-Raphaelite stuff. Then they commissioned art (I presume) from a bunch of fantasy artists. John Howe, who used to do all of those Lord of the RIngs calendars (sorry, that's my main association) is widely represented. In the book of Fairies and Elves, Kinuko Y. Craft illustrated a ton of short stories. John Jude Palencar did quite a bit of illustrative work here and there in the series. In at least a few volumes, so did folks like Barry Moser. As I flip through the pages I keep going (with adult eyes): oh, Rackham; oh Dulac!; oh, Waterhouse!; oh, Kinuko Y. Craft ::sigh::. I realize how deeply I imprinted on this art, and this artistic vision of what the world of fantasy and folklore was. I read these books obsessively from age 6-10 because we had a good size stack of them in our house and because they were, for my linear mind, tricky to read - the inset stories that interrupted the narrative of the chapter, the sidebar stories, etc were very multi-threaded and I wasn't good at that which gave them a feel of mystery.
And they were quite dark and honest about the blood and sex being IN the story, even if they didn't linger on it. They weren't expurgated in the manner of the Lang collections or the "__Country/Culture Name__ Folk and Fairytales" series that I could get from the library. I had a rhyming translation of the Odyssey for kids that I read over and over, and my Bullfinch collection, but these were something different. The art, the story, they way they were compiled just kept drawing me. And now I have them to read again, after which they will go on the shelf next to my giant, deeply outdated library-discard two-volume encyclopeda of folklore. And I will do a crazed happy dance around them. Edited to add: I take it back about the geographic distribution of stories: I'm paging through the Lore of Love right now and there are both Aztec and Polynesian stories in it.
And on a shelf in the children's section, they had 16 titles from Time Life's The Enchanted World series.
I squeeed, asked the proprietor if I could get a cut rate per title if I bought them all. The answer was yes. So now I have 16 of these, and some are ones I'd read before, and some are ones I've never seen before. I'm sure I could Google it, but I don't actually know how many titles were in the series. I am having to work hard to resist the urge to hole up with a gallon of cocoa and not come out till spring.
I'm realizing with a combination of embarrassment and joy what a huge percentage of the folklore that Really Really Stuck from my childhood came from these books. Also, how deeply I imprinted on the art selections contained inside.
The beautiful inset picture story for Tam Lin; the explanation of Thor and Loki's visit to the hall of the giants; stuff about Vanamoinen; stuff about Taliesin; many, many beautifully illustrated versions of classic Grimm fairy tales; Gawain and the Green Knight; herblore; the tale of Faust and his deal with Mephistopheles. These books were for me what the Andrew Lang collections were for some other people. Mostly European and classic (i.e. Greek/Roman) in inclusion, there were also a smattering of Egyptian/Russian/Chinese/Japanese/Indian stories and lore scattered in. I don't recall much of any stuff from non-Meditteranean bits of Africa or from North or South America, which I recall looking back as pretty standard inclusion/exclusion patterns for most of the stuff I saw as a kid - and wasn't something I noticed as a kid since then all the stories were new to me.
Then there's the art, which ranges from appealing to competent to outstanding to classic. What they did here was to get reprint rights on a ton of the Victorian/Edwardian picture book classics, and also on a bunch of the more widely known pre-Raphaelite stuff. Then they commissioned art (I presume) from a bunch of fantasy artists. John Howe, who used to do all of those Lord of the RIngs calendars (sorry, that's my main association) is widely represented. In the book of Fairies and Elves, Kinuko Y. Craft illustrated a ton of short stories. John Jude Palencar did quite a bit of illustrative work here and there in the series. In at least a few volumes, so did folks like Barry Moser. As I flip through the pages I keep going (with adult eyes): oh, Rackham; oh Dulac!; oh, Waterhouse!; oh, Kinuko Y. Craft ::sigh::. I realize how deeply I imprinted on this art, and this artistic vision of what the world of fantasy and folklore was. I read these books obsessively from age 6-10 because we had a good size stack of them in our house and because they were, for my linear mind, tricky to read - the inset stories that interrupted the narrative of the chapter, the sidebar stories, etc were very multi-threaded and I wasn't good at that which gave them a feel of mystery.
And they were quite dark and honest about the blood and sex being IN the story, even if they didn't linger on it. They weren't expurgated in the manner of the Lang collections or the "__Country/Culture Name__ Folk and Fairytales" series that I could get from the library. I had a rhyming translation of the Odyssey for kids that I read over and over, and my Bullfinch collection, but these were something different. The art, the story, they way they were compiled just kept drawing me. And now I have them to read again, after which they will go on the shelf next to my giant, deeply outdated library-discard two-volume encyclopeda of folklore. And I will do a crazed happy dance around them. Edited to add: I take it back about the geographic distribution of stories: I'm paging through the Lore of Love right now and there are both Aztec and Polynesian stories in it.
