Read by Gordon Fairclough et al. For use with Collected Tales from Aesop's Fables. Manufactured in Taiwan. Gallery Books: Smith Publishers: Victoria House Publishing.
1927? Aesop's Fablegram Series. Twelve monthly calendars for 1928 featuring maxims from Aesop's fables and Milo Winter illustrations. 4¾" x 10". St. Paul, MN, and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario: Brown & Bigelow. $100 from bisboutique on Ebay, May, '24.
These are colorful presentations of animal scenes with aphorisms attributed to Aesop. The illustrations are true Milo Winter, regularly charming. Sometimes a fable's original scene and characters appear, as in WL (March) TH (November). Others create scenes to illustrate standard Aesopic morals, as when September features a straw held before a cart-pulling donkey with "Gentle persuasion is better than blows," more normally associated with WS. Here twelve different advertisers are featured as examples of Brown and Bigelow's work. Each calendar has a hole at its center top. Though the introductory slip came with the 1930 group, I also place it here, since it seems to refer more directly to this group.
Product Managers: Todd Power and Liza Weiman. English and Spanish. Product Design: Mark Schlichting. Art Direction: Bridget Erdmann. Art Direction: Bridget Erdmann. Novato, CA: Living Books: Random House/Broderbund Company.
2021 Aesop's Fable Tags and Frames Scrapbook Paper. CBSS159. Ciao Bella. Made in Italy. 12" x 12". $1.89 from Ciao Bella through Etsy, April, '23.
BC, LM, TMCM; GA; and TH are various images able to be used from this surpsing page. Does one cut them out to make "tags" of them?
1961 "Aesop's Fable of the Lion and the Mouse." #22. Kenner-Color Slides for use with Kenner's Give-A-Show Projector. Made and printed in U.S.A. Kenner Products Co.
7 four-colored panels, each with two lines of text underneath. I now know the source of the set of pictures that I had found years ago at a flea market. Bob Engel had then put these little treasures into a beautiful glass-and-copper frame for me. Since seeing it frontwards shows the sequence in reverse, I offer two views here.
1967 Aesop's Fables. Read by Boris Karloff. Directed by Howard Sackler. NY: Caedmon. Gift of Pat Donnelly from the Milwaukee Public Library, June, '93.
Twenty-one fables on each side. Karloff's reading is sensitive but surprisingly low-keyed. The texts, whose author I cannot identify, seem classic, pithy, well expressed. This record is not as clear as the audio cassette of the same production.
1965? Aesop's Best Known Fables. Featuring the Regency Players. Talespinners for Children. UAC 11068. Los Angeles, CA: Liberty/UA, Inc. Sunset Records. Entertainment from Transamerica Corporation. $4.99 from Robert Beckley Newton, MS, through Ebay, May, '00.
From the jacket, it appears that each side presents three groupings of three fables each. Each grouping lasts between three and about five minutes.
Advertisement in red and black for John J. McKendry's Aesop: Five Centuries of Illustrated Fables published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 11¼" x 15", folded into six quadrants.
2001 Aesop: Alive and Well. CD. Diane Ferlatte, Storyteller. Erik Pearson, Guitarist. San Francisco: Olde West Inc. $4.64 from Jukebox On-Line, WindGap, PA, Nov., '09.
Guitar background. Lively sung introductions to Aesop and to his life, followed by five stories 6 to 12 minutes in length. CP, BW, AD, "The Monkey & the Donkey," and DS. At the end there is a reprise of "Aesop, Alive and Well." I listened to "Poor Crow" and "The Shepherd Boy." Ferlatte continues to tell of Aesop's life between fables. Narration moves easily into song. The renditions are engaging. For example, the dying laugh of the shepherd boy at others' expense is very well done.
1993 Aesop Wrote a Fable. Anthony Thistlethwaite. Printed in France. London: Rolling Acres: Purpleteeth Productions.
This was a lark! I bid not knowing what the disc might entail. The disc is named after one song (the fourth track on the CD, lasting 2:17). That song starts with these words "Aesop wrote a fable about the tortoise and the hare. I always take the scenic route when I want to get somewhere." It soon moves into the refrain about the singer's woman: "She's a natural born lover, and she loves to take her time." Thus she never uses a calendar or remembers dates or hurries. Is she the tortoise or the hare? Aesop, you do not know what you started!
1958? Museo del Prado: Velazquez: "Esopo." Apparently with a "First Day of Emission" postmark from March 24, 1959 cancelling a 1.80 Ptas stamp picturing the upper section of this portrait in green. Printed in Spain. Ediciones Artisticas, Madrid. $5 from Laurentiu Cruceanu, Bacau, Romania, through eBay, August, '02.
I had not known that there is a Spanish stamp commemorating Aesop. If anything, the green stamp is clearer in its detail than is the colored reproduction of the painting. I will put the postcard with stamps and mail.
2020 Refrigerator magnet "When all is said and done, more is said than done. –Aesop". $5 from StuckOnUArt through Etsy, July, '20.
I find it intriguing to see what statements are attributed to Aesop. I am sure that this sentiment fits with more than one fable, but I am unsure where this formulation entered the Aesopic tradition.
2004 Aesop Goes Modern. CD. 29 tracks. Directed by Daniele J. Suissa. Written by Kim Terrell. Produced by Marc Solomon. Virtual Theatre Project.
"Charming Educational Stories for Ages 4 and Up!" I agree. Seven-year-old Asher meets Aesop and Aesop's father, and they start to tell him fables. They wisely tell him early that there is no right answer to a story. There are musical interludes leading into this encounter and filling in as Asher asks other people what they think a fable means and returns with his best "answer." The last track in fact has a lyre playing for the donkey who cannot play it himself. Track 20 brings Danielle, who recites a La Fontaine's DW section by section in French, and Aesop translates. This version pleases me more than the one Aesop presented as his first fable. I expected a more radical "modernization" of Aesop here. I would say that his storytelling is here taken seriously for what it is.
1940 Aesop Fables Society of Medalists SOM-21, silver plated by Edmond Amateis.
This double-sided medallion is both large (2.6” in diameter) and heavy. The seller notes that Amateis selected these fables for "their enduring timeliness and left the interpretation up to the beholder, as best suits his sociological, political, or economic inclinations." For me, both faces reveal a great deal in their lowest segment: the reflection in DS and the pinned dove under the regal hawk.
2002? Aesop Fable Placemats. 10” x 13”. Based on prints by Linda Powell. $5.95 from Lisa Baldwin on Ebay, April, '03.
I knew one of the six images used here from a card I was given in 1985, viewable under greeting cards. Now I have been able to recognize that Linda Powell was the creator of this set of designs, as seen in her prints. This set of six placements seems to include three fables: TH, FG, and GGE. The images are richly and brightly colored.
2011 Aesop Dress'd Or a Collection of Fables. Bernard Mandeville, based on Jean de La Fontaine. First published in 1704. The Augustan Reprint Society. Digitalized on CD by "The Again Shop." Wordcount: 19504. Pages: 67. Purchased online.
Our collection has three copies of the Augustan Reprint digitalized here. This kind of "book" created by a print-recognition device does not have much appeal for me. A photographic reprint of the book has, for me, much more appeal. I suppose that there is a kind of searchability achieved by this digitalization. I did a quick search for "fox" and immediately got 16 "hits." That is a good sign!
