London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1889. First edition. A lovely, Near Fine copy. viii, 390, [2], 16 [publisher's ads]. Illustrated with eight plates, including frontispiece. Publisher's pictorial blue cloth stamped in gilt. Very minor edgewear to boards. All edges gilt. Dark blue coated endpapers. A bit of foxing, mostly to first few leaves, and a tear to edge of D2 touching a few lines but not affecting legibility. Overall, an unusually attractive copy, presenting very well.

The Blue Fairy Book, the first of the twelve Color Fairy Books edited by Andrew Lang, compiles beloved fairytales like "Cinderella," "Beauty and the Beast," "Goldilocks," "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp," and "East of the Sun and West of the Moon." Over the course of the series, which culminated with the Lilac Fairy Book in 1910, Lang drew on a broad range of sources from the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault to the Arabian Nights to Norwegian legends. The result was an immensely popular series that both entertained generations of young readers and expanded the conception of fairytales in the English-speaking world.

In the Grolier Club's One Hundred Books Famous in Children's Literature, editor Chris Loker writes, "The Blue Fairy Book was a fairly casual production, lacking an coherence and including such anomalies as a chunk from Gulliver's Travels and Lang's attempt to convert the Greek Perseus story into a folktale, but its success was immediate and demanded sequels, a task to which Lang gave editorial oversight but with little heed to any editorial purpose – 'stalls in a rummage sale,' said Tolkien. From the start he was dependent on a team of women" including his wife, Leonora Blanche Lang (1851 - 1833), who reported that she "wrote the bulk of all the Fairy Books after the first four." The success of the Color Fairy Books was "fortuitous, appearing as they did on the brink of the Art Nouveau movement and almost coinciding with the brilliant series of tales edited by folklorist Joseph Jacobs"; the series also owed much of its success to the charming illustrations that appeared throughout each volume, which were provided by Henry Justice Ford (1860 - 1941) with the first two volumes also featuring the contributions of George Jacomb-Hood (1857 - 1929) and Lancelot Speed (1860 - 1931).

One Hundred Books Famous in Children's Literature, 52. Near Fine (Item #8024)