Fables for the Times

Abstract

Earlier I found a publish-on-demand Xerox of this book without its illustrations. Now I am delighted to find an original, 8½" x 12" in landscape format. Alas, it is in poor condition, without a title-page, and so I guess at some of the bibliographical data. Pages are loose and torn, and 17-18 and 31-34 are missing – but I am delighted to have found this book. I will guess that it is an 1896 original and that the "Times" is the New York Times. There is some help from Project Gutenberg, where one can also find the illustrations. As I wrote then, what we have here are twenty standard Aesopic or Aesopic-like fables cleverly turned to contemporary humorous purposes, often summed up in a clever proverbial "immoral." The book seems to me much in the spirit of Bierce, and that is a very clever spirit! In DS, the dog stopped to think about angles and refractions, decided that what he was seeing were "only optical phenomena," and "trotted on his way to Boston without further thought on the matter" (8). "A fox stood under an apple-tree and gazed up earnestly at the globes of yellow lusciousness. 'How sad, for the sake of an old-time piece of literature,' he said, 'that the fox is a carnivorous animal and doesn't care particularly about fruit!'" (10). The fox said that with a voice the crow would rank with prima donnas. The crow dropped the meat on his head, blinded him, and pecked him viciously. She was distressed to be compared with "them shameless French singing hussies"! Moral: "Don't praise the soft whiteness of a labor delegate's hands" (12). The thirsty wolf asks the young lamb to bring him water. She does, with some knock-out drops in it (22)!