Anbolyn@Gudrun’s Tights has joined in a children’s literature challenge which you can read about here. Really this challenge is right up my street as I love children’s classics, but then again I promised myself that I wouldn’t join in any challenges this year – so I’m not doing it, but I will lurk around the periphery of it, just to see if there are any books which I should have read but haven’t.

Anyway, I had been planning to start a ‘Books from my bookshelves’ series of posts, a sort of – now and again thing, just whenever the urge strikes me – or as we used to say in Scotland – ‘when it comes up my back’ meaning just when I feel like it. Don’t ask me the origins of that strange Scottish phrase!

So, on that note I thought I would share with you one of my lovely Folio books. It’s Perrault’s Fairy Tales Illustrated by Edmund Dulac.

The book contains:

The Sleeping Beauty
Little Red Riding Hood
Blue Beard
Puss in Boots
The Fairy
Cinderella
Riquet-with-the-Tuft
Hop-o’-my Thumb
Beauty and the Beast

The Dulac illustrations are beautiful, as indeed is the whole book. This illustration is captioned AND THERE IN A ROW, HUNG THE BODIES OF SEVEN DEAD WOMEN. Well, fairy tales are all about warning youngsters of the dangerous situations that they might find themselves in if they aren’t careful! If you want to see more of Edmund Dulac’s work have a look here.

You can download Charles Perrault’s Fairy Tales here.