Description
Very Good+ illustrated dust jacket, price clipped. A Mylar dust jacket has been added. The Very Good+ binding is blue cloth over boards with embossed stars. Color and brown-and-white illustrations throughout by Kay Nielsen. Pages are clean and the binding is tight, illustrated endpapers. The book measures 11.3″ tall x 8.7″ wide.
About the book (from the dust jacket)
HANS ANDERSEN’S fairy tales are loved throughout the world, perhaps because they combine the fantasy of legend with the reality of human experience in a way that touches everyone. Originally written in Danish, they have been reprinted again and again in many languages. In 1924 the brilliant artist Kay Nielsen produced for an English publisher a superb set of illustrations that appeared with a selection of the stories in a now rare and highly prized edition of only five hundred copies. This new edition, reproduced from a copy in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. contains all the beautiful color plates of that splendid volume along with the tales they illustrated: The Tinder Box, The Real Princess, The Hardy Tin Soldier. Ole Luk-Oie, The Swineherd. The Nightingale, The Snow Queen, The Shepherdess and the Chimney-Sweeper, The Elder Tree Mother, and The Story of a Mother
In its present form the book is a companion volume to the edition of Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, also beautifully illustrated by Kay Nielsen, that was published by The Viking Press in 1979 with an introduction by Bryan Holme.
About the author (from the dust jacket)
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN was born in Odense, Denmark, in 1805. At the age of fourteen, he left home for Copenhagen. There he tried to become an actor but eventually turned to writing, with the help of a fiend at the Royal Theatre, he went back to school, ultimately studying at the University of Copenhagen. His first important book was the fantasy A Walk from Holmen’s Canal to the Eastern Point of the Island of Amager, which was published in 1829. This was followed by a volume of poems in 1830. His poetry attracted the patronage of the king, and he was given a pension that made it possible for him to go to Europe and write about his travels. His first novel, Improvisatoren, appeared in 1835, and in that same year he published his first volume of the fairy tales that were to make him internationally famous, outstripping in popularity all of his poetry, plays, novels, and travel books. He died in 1875.
About the illustrator (from the dust jacket)
KAY NIELSEN was born in Copenhagen in 1886. He went to Paris to study at the Académie Julienne in 1904, and his career as an illustrator was launched in 1912. when his first exhibition-a series of illustrations for a proposed book, The Book of Death–was held in London. In Powder and Crinoline appeared in 1913, and East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Old Tales from the North, followed in 1914. In !926 he moved to the United States, where he became a muralist and motion-picture set designer in Hollywood. The last collection of tales that he illustrated was Red Mavic, A Collection of the World’s Best Fairy Tales from All Countries, published in 1930. He died in relative obscurity in 1957.
