I’m back to making ebooks, this time continuing the colored fairy book series with The Red Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang, available in EPUB and Kindle editions.
Also, I’ve put the ebook source files on GitHub. (Mostly to allow for pull requests to fix typos, but also because I thought it would be nice to make the source files freely available as well.) I’ll eventually be posting sources for all my existing ebooks as well, though it’ll take some time to go through them.
Today’s ebook release: George MacDonald’s fairy tale The Light Princess, available as always in EPUB, Kindle, and web editions.
I was pleasantly surprised to see how well the book (or story, rather, since it’s actually very short) held up to a rereading. Mmm, I love George MacDonald’s work.
Today’s release: The Blue Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang, available in EPUB and Kindle editions.
While publishing Grimm in German and Perrault in French was great (and I’ll continue to publish original language editions like them), I’ve long wanted to start publishing fairy tale collections in English. I mean, reading to my kids in 1800s German is cool and all, and I’m certainly planning to do so (along with a delicious array of other old languages), but I have this unshakable feeling that every once in a while they’ll want their stories to be in English. Weird, I know.
So English it is, and Lang’s twelve colored fairy books (published 1889–1910) were the natural place to start. This is the first of the series. Enjoy.
For a few years now I’ve wanted to publish the first German edition of the Grimms’ fairy tales, and today that wish comes true. The Kinder- und Hausmärchen was originally published in two parts, one in 1812 and one in 1815. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published several more editions of the tales during their lifetimes, adding new stories (lots) and removing others (not quite as many).
Anyway, you can read the tales in EPUB or Kindle.
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.