Original Mother Goose

Today’s book release: Charles Perrault’s 1697 French edition of Histoires ou Contes du temps passé, avec des moralités: Contes de ma mère l’Oye, more commonly known as the Mother Goose tales. It’s available in PDF, EPUB, and Kindle formats.

The collection contains eight stories including “La Belle au bois dormant” (Sleeping Beauty), “Le Petit Chaperon rouge” (Little Red Riding Hood), and “La Barbe-Bleuë” (Bluebeard).

This book marks the beginning of a series of fairy tale and folk tale collections that I’ll be publishing. (The original 1812/1815 German edition of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen is next and is almost done.) Future books in this series will include the Arabian Nights (including Galland’s original French translation), the eight-volume Russian collection by Alexander Afanasyev, Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, and Joseph Jacobs’ English fairy tales, among others. (And while there will certainly be an emphasis on the earliest editions of these tales, I’ll also be publishing English translations.)

If you know of any pre-1923 fairy/folk tale collections you’d like to see in this series, let me know.