Once upon a Time: A Book of Old-Time Fairy Tales

My mother received this book from her mother as a Christmas gift in 1926 when she was just 6 years old. She so loved the book. She tried to copy the pictures over and over by tracing over them. Her book is worn now, but still very treasured. She read the stories to me when I was small and reads them now to my children, now just 4 and 1. The 4 year old loves the book. The stories are not told in a scary manner but are very magical and also moral, with the good people winning out in the end. The illustrations are beautiful. I highly recommend this book. I am very hopeful that I will be able to find another copy of it.

I can recall as a young child curling up next to my mother, while she read to me from her favorite children's book, "Once Upon a Time, A Book of Old-Time Fairy Tales," by Katharine Lee Bates (Rand McNally & Company, 1921). She had received this book for her own fifth birthday. In time I knew all my favorite illustrations by the marvelous Margaret Evans Price, and could recite most of the book's stories by heart. My favorites were "Furball," "Hop O' My Thumb" and "The Dancing Shoes." The stories contained in "Once Upon a Time" are part of the time-honored tradition of fairy stories which relied on the imagination of the child and the voice of the storyteller to ignite. Edited by Bates, Professor of English Literature at Wellesley College, the protagonists of the stories are good and often beautiful; they always find love and/or good fortune. By comparison, the antagonists get their just desserts; however, they are obviously bad, and merely scary rather than terrifying. There's something solid and safe about these tales; they're not explosive or bigger than life, just extraordinary in the nicest way. "Furball" tells the story of a motherless princess, who is sold by her feckless father into marriage to an ogre. Innocent but resourceful, she agrees to the marriage on the condition that her father provide her with four lavish and presumably impossible-to-furnish items of clothing: a dress "as golden as the sun," another as "silvery as the moon," a third as "glittering as the stars"; and a coat made of "a thousand different kinds of fur" from "every animal in the kingdom." To her chagrin, her father presents her with all she has requested. Now, faced with marriage to the ogre, she sees that her only remedy is to run away. So she folds her new clothing into a packet so small "she could shut them up in a walnut shell." Wearing her fur coat and staining her face and hands with walnut juice for concealment, she runs until she comes to a forest, where she falls into exhausted sleep. Discovered slumbering in the hollow of a tree by a neighboring young king and his huntsmen, and thought initially to be an odd sort of animal, the young king decides to rescue her and takes her to his castle. Recognizing neither her beauty nor her royalty in her disguise, he assigns her to work as a scullery maid in the castle kitchen. Eventually wooed by her cleverness, soon revealed beauty and unexpected culinary expertise, he. . . well, you know the rest. "Toads and Vipers" is the story of a widow with two daughters. The elder, who resembles her mother in face and character and is therefore favored by her mother, is homely and rude. But the younger takes after her late father, and is pleasing in her appearance and sweet-tempered. One day, a fairy, disguised as a crone, hobbles up to the fair sister and asks her for a libation. The young girl graciously proffers the woman a drink from her pitcher, and, in return, the fairy/woman grace