1962 Colored postcard of La Fontaine’s FS by Jean Effel. Isogiz. PSNX. $10.90 from Flying Ship 1, Chernivtsi, Ukraine, through Ebay, May, ’21.
Vintage Effel. Great expressions on both faces. Beautiful color work. This is the fox’s turn. Is there a corresponding card featuring the stork’s turn?
1993 Jean de La Fontaine: Oh! les belles fables! Dit par Albert Millaire. Musique de Alexandre Stanké. Grand Auteurs/petits lecteurs. Stanké livre & cassette. Canada: Les éditions internationales Alain Stanké. Tape and booklet for $15.95 Canadian at Coles, Montreal, Oct., '95.
A very nice set. I find the tape's reading and sound-effects stronger than the book's illustrations. Each side of the cassette presents eight fables. The first side takes seventeen minutes, while the second takes somewhat more than eighteen minutes. See my listing also of the book and of a compact disk that seem to have come out together..
1993 Jean de La Fontaine: Oh! les belles fables! Albert Millaire. Musique de Alexandre Stanké. Illustrations et conception visuelle: Anne Côte. Productions: Les Éditions Stanké. Fabriqué au Québec. Participation Sodec. COF-12-CD. Coffragants.
A very nice rendition of sixteen La Fontaine fables, complete with well integrated orchestral support. Millaire has a lovely voice. See the book and cassette that were all apparently done together.
2000 Jean de La Fontaine: Fables. Tome 2. CD. Narrator: Albert Millaire. Illustrations: Anne Coté. Musique: Alexandre Stanké. Collection Coffragants: Alexandre Stanké. From Patrice Julien, Quebec.
Lively and articulate narrations of seventeen fables, separated by brief musical interludes. This and a 1993 CD, also from Millaire and Stanké, may be the only CDs in our collection narrated by a Canadian, though I am sure I cannot tell the different in accent. The disc is accompanied by a 48-page booklet offering the French texts of the fables with one colored and several black-and-white drawings of Anne Coté. Our collection also includes a 1993 audio cassette of Albert Millaire reading, again for Alexandre Alexandre Stanké. I could not establish any clear relationship between this CD and that cassette and could also not compare this CD and booklet with the CD and publication from 1993.
1998? Jean de La Fontaine: 6 Fables de toujours. 20 cubes en bois. Fabriqué en France. St. Germain-en-Montagne, France. Jeujura. 155 Francs at Le Bon Marché, Paris, August, '99.
Six cartoon pictures in 5x4 form in a sturdy wooden box. The packing advertises "100% Fabrication en France" against a red, white, and blue background. A "livret" gives all six pictures. The pictures on each cube are in a sequence; rotate all one turn and revolve all one turn, and you have a complete image. Twenty is a high number of blocks for a puzzle of this sort. Sudden arrangements for a quick trip home for a funeral gave me an extra afternoon in Paris. What a nice surprise to find this set as I bummed around!
1950? Jean de La Fontaine présente...Maitre Corbeau. Paris: Edition de L'Office Central de l'Imagerie. $10 from Nicholas Gulotta, Sharon, WI, through eBay, June, '14.
Here is an ingenious piece of ephemera. One opens a brochure somewhat smaller than 10" x 4". As one opens, scenes open and succeed each other, each with a portion of La Fontaine's "Fox and Crow" on a facing text page. There are two double panels, five single panels, and a final double panel. The first double panel opens a curtain on a crow with a piece of cheese perched in a tree. The second double panel first shows a fox approaching and then, as one opens further, shows him beneath the crow. The first single panel has the crow holding the cheese high. In the next, the cheese is out of the crow's beak, and the tongue is out of the fox's mouth! The next panel shows tears -- or saliva? -- falling from the crow. One more panel shows the fox holding the cheese below an expressionless crow. In the final single panel, the fox is exiting, and the crow seems to be reading a bible on his branch. The last double panel provides a curtain call for the two characters. The fun lies in folding open one panel at a time and finding the appropriate verses and scene. Lovely use of red, brown, black, and green. I am not sure whether to list this lovely piece as a book or a brochure, so I will do both!
1992 Jean Claval "L'Aventure Carto: Les Fables de La Fontaine." One title-card and 37 of 40 portrait postcards offering humorous interpretations of La Fontaine's fables. #AC 92001 through AC 920041. $120 from Bertrand Cocq, Calonne Ricouart, France, Sept., '18.
This is one of the liveliest sets of illustrations of La Fontaine's fables that I have encountered. Card after card has surprises! The ass who has crossed the river with salt holds onto a bush with a fingered hand in #2. In #9, the angler is wondering about the small fish he has caught just as a huge Jaws-like shark is ready to break the surface just below him! In "Acorn and Pumpkin" (#15), La Fontaine is walking away from and looking back at the bumpkin about to get hit on the nose by a dropping acorn. In OR (#25), for some reason, Marilyn Monroe is letting the breeze attacking the oak and reed blow up her skirt! In FC (#30), the cheese box is a particular brand, "Caprice des Dieux." On the wall of the bedroom of the dying laborer telling his sons that there is a treasure in the family field, there is a calendar from "The Friends of Mona Lisa" for the year 1695. For me, the first of the two most enjoyable scenes is "Fox and Goat" (#16), with a wild array of objects covered underground from previous eras. The other is "Cobbler and Banker" (#32): so much is going on in the village, including perhaps the artist hawking his cards! TB (#23) may be a specific contemporary political satire; the faces of the two human figures are so specifically portrayed. In GGE (#27), is someone about to kill the rich old hen? Enjoy these cards, especially in their enlarged form, occasioned by clicking on a specific card.
1972? Jaymar Tortoise and Hare Puzzle. Ages 4-6. 12 pieces. Copyright Drawing Board Greeting Cards. Jaymar Specialty Company, Brooklyn, NY. $11.99 from glass-eye-industries through Ebay, May, '19.
This puzzle fits together very tightly. I learned how difficult it is to put a puzzle inside its frame onto a flatbed scanner! There is also a puzzle of TMCM in the same series of six puzzles for ages 4 to 6. Hmmmm.....
By Noor Inayat Khan. Read by Ellen Burstyn. Musical accompaniment composed by Allaudin Mathieu. From the book Twenty Jataka Tales, published by Inner Traditions International (1991). Berkeley, CA: Audio Literature.
1974 Le Jardin Dumaine: "Le Loup et l'Agneau." Luçon (Vendée-'85). Postmarked Sept.1, 1974. Artaud Frères. Nantes-Carquefou, Nantes. €4 Témoignage d'Images, Paris, at the Paris Post Card Exhibition, Jan., '05.
This close-up photograph was done by the same company that did a greater distance shot for another postcard of uncertain date but postmarked in 1985. Here one sees more clearly the water separating wolf and lamb.
1957? Japanese red tin toy steam locomotive with friction motor, marked "Aesop" at the front both left and right. 9" long and 3.5" high. Marked "EO" and "Made in Japan." $6 from Matt McKeeby, Schenectady, NY, through Ebay, Feb., '00. Click on the image to see the engine larger.
Now this takes a prize! An Aesop locomotive! I gather that this toy comes from the era during which the Japanese were prone to put any symbol on any object and (re)produce it. "D-57" appears beneath the engineer's windows and on the boiler-cover at the front. There a bunny holds flags, perhaps for the tortoise and hare whose heads are pictured above the name "Aesop" on the flag panels on either side of the boiler-cover. Further back on the left side a crow in a cap holds a mouse either by a string or by its tail. On the opposite side a zebra and bear face each other. The engineer is a stork, who has a wing resting leisurely outside the windows on both sides! On the roof above him is a flying bird. In my years of collecting I never dreamed that such a thing existed.
