Best of Aesop's Fables

Abstract

Here are 69 fables on some 144 pages, with a T of C on 4-7. In each of the two-page configurations there is text on the left with a surrounding color frame of the story's background. The right-hand page is a full-page, simple colored picture. Only the last story lacks a right-hand page and so a corresponding illustration. One finds typical substitutions, as in The Hawk and the Jackal (14), where Aesop has an eagle and a fox. The thief here does not bite his mother's ear; he hits her (34)! The Cat and the Hen (44), which features the cat as a doctor, has a clever moral: Uninvited guests are welcome after they leave. Not a stag but an antelope gets its horns caught in tree branches (48). There is a folded page corner on 59-60. The moral of the fable about a lion's bad breath advises that we keep quite (78). In The Bull and the Gnat (80), the latter sits sometimes on the bull's horn and sometimes on his tail. A story about a sheep in lion's clothing combines DLS and WSC (84); eating grass gives him away to another lion. Not a fox but a jackal has his tail set on fire by a farmer (94). A fable about an over-solicitous weaver bird and a monkey has this moral: Advice people only when they want it (110). The Moneylender and His Purse (112) is a good story about outwitting the lying moneylender who claimed that his purse had eleven coins and the finder had already kept one. A clever village headman declares Then what this man found with ten coins in it was not your purse! On 134 we find a donkey in a tiger's skin. In the Pandora story, it is not Pandora but man who causes the problem, and what he has left is not hope but expectation, which is strangely pictured as a horse (116). The dustjackets match the covers. The Grasshopper and the Donkey (70) is on the front cover, while the title-page shows WC. This book complements another in the series, Best of More Aesop's Fables, listed under 2007/12.