The Orange Fairy Book.: With Eight Coloured Plates and Numerous Illustrations by H. J. Ford.

London: Longmans, Green, and Co., , 1906. In the rare dust jacket First edition, first impression, of the tenth of Andrew Lang's Fairy Books, gathering folk stories from Africa to Jutland, here a particularly fine copy preserving - most unusually - the original dust jacket, without restoration. "The series became a landmark in the presentation of traditional tales, for it introduced children to selections of old and new tales of every kind, known and unknown, and from many different sources, at a time when interest in fairy tales was beginning to decline" (Whalley & Chester, p. 141). Though it is Andrew Lang's name which appears as the author of the fairy books, they were largely the result of the work of others, most crucially female translators such as his wife, Leonora (1851-1933) and others such as May Kendall and Margaret Hunt, both of whom also published fairy tales collections in their own name. Lang acknowledged this in the preface to The Lilac Fairy Book (1910): "The fairy books have been almost wholly the work of Mrs. Lang, who has translated and adapted them from the French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, and other languages". Octavo. Original orange cloth, spine lettered in gilt, fairy design to front cover and spine in gilt, gilt edges. With dust jacket. Colour frontispiece and 6 colour plates with tissue guards, 17 black and white plates, illustrations in the text throughout. Times bookseller's ticket to rear pastedown. A fine copy, bright and tight, in very good dust jacket, chipped with closed tears at extremities yet still a nice example. Whalley & Chester, A History of Children's Book Illustration, 1988; Peter Harrington, Leonora Lang's Rainbow Fairy Books, available online.