1912 Scarce Book - The Italian Fairy Book illustrated by Morris M. Williams
The scarce 1916 Second Edition of Anne Macdonell’s enchanting collection of Italian fairy tales, beautifully illustrated by Morris Meredith Williams and preserved in its striking original pictorial cloth binding.
Author: Anne Macdonell.
Title: The Italian Fairy Book.
Publisher: London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., Adelphi Terrace, 1916.
Edition: Second Edition, stated; first published in 1911.
Language: English.
Pages: ix, 306 pages.
Size: 8 x 5.5 inches.
Binding: Very good original green cloth binding, strikingly decorated to the front board in orange, black, tan and grey with a fairy standing above a coiled dragon beneath an orange tree. Spine pictorially decorated and lettered in white and orange. Light rubbing and minor age wear to the extremities as shown, otherwise firm, attractive and well preserved. Protected in a removable mylar cover.
Content: Very good content, clean and well preserved, with occasional light spotting and age toning as shown. Contemporary ownership inscription to the front pastedown. Attractive illustrated endpapers featuring mice, fruit and decorative garlands.
Illustrations: Illustrated throughout by Morris Meredith Williams, with a full-page color frontispiece, numerous full-page and in-text black-and-white illustrations, decorative devices and illustrated endpapers.
Estimate: $300–350 USD.
The book:
The Italian Fairy Book gathers a wonderfully varied selection of traditional tales from across Italy, populated by fairies, dragons, enchanted animals, witches, kings, clever peasants and magical objects. Macdonell drew upon the rich traditions of Italian folklore to create an English-language collection that ranges geographically from Calabria and Tuscany to Sicily, the Tyrol and the Italian Riviera. Among the tales are Companions of the Forest, Fortune and the Booby, What the Stars Foretold, Lionbruno, The Seven Doves, The Enchanted Doe, The Talking Tree and The Three Griffin’s Feathers.
This scarce 1916 Second Edition is particularly appealing for Morris Meredith Williams’s imaginative illustrations. His dramatic color frontispiece, The Princess and the Horrid Dragon, sets the tone for a remarkable sequence of bold black-and-white designs combining medieval romance, grotesque creatures and Art Nouveau-influenced decorative linework. The exceptionally attractive publisher’s binding, itself richly illustrated with fairy-tale imagery, makes this an especially desirable example of the Edwardian illustrated fairy-book tradition.
The author:
Anne Macdonell (1858–1925) was a Scottish writer, historian and translator whose work ranged across biography, history, literature and folklore. Her interest in European culture and traditional storytelling is particularly evident in The Italian Fairy Book, first published in 1911, which introduced English-speaking children to a broad selection of Italy’s regional fairy-tale traditions.
Rather than presenting Italian folklore as a single uniform tradition, Macdonell emphasized its regional character and its relationship to the storytelling customs of the wider European world. The resulting collection remains an engaging bridge between literary fairy tales and the oral traditions from which many of them developed.
The illustrator:
Morris Meredith Williams (1881–1973) was a British painter and illustrator known especially for historical, legendary and literary subjects. His work combines strong draughtsmanship with a highly decorative sense of composition, particularly well suited to mythology, folklore and medieval romance.
For The Italian Fairy Book, Williams created an unusually rich visual world of dragons, fantastic animals, knights, princesses and supernatural figures. His intricate black-and-white illustrations are among the chief attractions of the volume, while the vivid frontispiece and elaborate pictorial binding give the book a distinctive character even among the lavishly illustrated fairy books of the early twentieth century.