Aesop's Fables

The pitch

The fox and the grapes, the tortoise and the hare, the boy who cried wolf — over two hundred of the oldest stories in the world, each done in a minute, in a handsome Victorian edition illustrated by Harrison Weir and John Tenniel (yes, the Alice illustrator). The stories are ancient and a minute long; the telling here is grandly Victorian.

What to know

There is no wrong way to read it: one fable at bedtime, or ten in a sitting. One caveat. This is the formal Victorian translation (the Wolf says “Sirrah”), so independent reading suits grades 3 and up, while younger kids do best hearing it read aloud, where the old-fashioned voice becomes part of the fun. Know that fables don’t soften nature; the wolf usually wins, quickly, with a moral attached. That’s why this book carries the parent-reads tag. The stories are a minute long, so it’s easy to soften one on the fly, and you can skip a wolf mid-sentence without losing the moral. The morals are printed right on the stories, which turns every fable into a thirty-second conversation, and nearly two hundred small illustrations keep pre-readers at the table.

Life when written

Legend says Aesop was an enslaved storyteller in Greece some twenty-six centuries ago, whose fables were so sharp they talked him into fame and, the stories claim, his freedom. The fables were spoken aloud for centuries before anyone wrote them down, then carried through Greek and Roman schoolrooms into every language in Europe. Our edition is the Victorians’ — they dressed the ancient stories in formal English and grand engravings, and put a copy in every nursery.