Item
Isoppu Monogatari (Aesop's Fables) [in Japanese]
- Title
- en_US Isoppu Monogatari (Aesop's Fables) [in Japanese]
- Description
- en_US Language note: Japanese
- Takeo Takei, Masao Kusuyama
- Creator
- en_US Takei, Takeo See all items with this value
- Contributor
- en_US Takei, Takeo
- Date
- 2019-04-09T19:34:36Z
- 2019-01
- en_US 1925
- Date Available
- 2019-04-09T19:34:36Z
- Date Issued
- en_US 1925
- Abstract
- en_US There are some issues with this first edition copy. All 96 pages are present. Front and rear boards are detached, and the corners mildly rubbed. The spine is gone. There is a tear at top of pg. 12/13, and there is a faint round fox spot in the lower binding margin on 21-23, with a little more visible from 24-29, but then faint on 30-31 and gone on the next page. On pg. 61-62 at the top is a surface repair. Still, I am simply delighted to get an original edition copy of this wonderfully whimsical approach to Aesop from a region where we might not have expected it. In the next show of this collection, this work needs to have a spot! When I found this book, I sought and ordered a recent reprinting that I could handle more readily. The book starts with a cover that I do not understand. A mouse holds a candle? At least it marks in English along its border "Aesops Fables." There are 24 fables here, each receiving four pages. That total marks a discrepancy from the reprinted version of 2014. One story here is not there: the blackamoor whom an Athenian tried to scrub clean (53-56). I had noticed that two sites online that feature images from this book included an image not in the 2014 edition. This excision gives the answer! The first left-hand page offers a title, almost always in Japanese, with a large black-and-white design, already often whimsical. We turn that page – backwards, of course, to our reckoning – and we find a three-colored two-page depiction of a high moment in the story. Turn again, and there is, apparently, a full page of Japanese text of the story. Thus, after introductory material like the frontispiece and T of C, for the 24 fables there are 96 pages in the heart of this edition. There are three unpaginated full-color full-page illustrations: for "The Fox and the Woodcutter," "Doctor Cat," and the frontispiece of Aesop blowing animals out of a big horn! My prizes for the two-page spreads go to "The Fox and the Woodcutter" and MSA. Other excellent spreads are SW, WL, FS, TMCM, FG, GA, MM, OR, and FC. Two fables near the center are hard for me to figure out, involving perhaps, respectively, a hawk and a rabbit (33-40). The variety in art forms is one of the many things that make this such a special book! There is an "extra" page at the end of this book – not in the reprint -- that I do not understand; it is entirely in Japanese.
- Identifier
- en_US 11568 (Access ID)
- Language
- en_US jpn
- Publisher
- en_US Fuzanbo
- Item sets
- Carlson Fable Collection Books