Fables de la Fontaine

Abstract

This is our fifth Nézière version of La Fontaine and one of the most interesting. Here is the history as I believe we can reconstruct it. Mame published a fine Nézière edition in 1926. It was slightly larger than this present edition, which is almost 8" x 11". It contained 60 fables on its 159 pages. It combined 16 strong full-page colored illustrations with two smaller black-and-white illustrations for every fable except one, MM. The match between the colored and black-and-white illustrations was particularly good. Front and back covers also had full-page illustrations of arches with the poet on stage on the front cover and anthropomorphized animal characters in the foreground; on the back cover, another set of anthropomorphized animal characters was in the foreground. I praised this book for its extravagant imagination. This edition was apparently exactly reprinted in 1930 in our second copy. Our third copy is an inexpensive Dutch paperback from 1979, but it coincides with the present book in presenting internally only black-and-white versions of Nézière's original illustrations. It presents only 35 fables and eliminates entirely the full-page illustrations. The fourth book is a 2001 Everyman's Library edition that reproduces both the smaller black-and-white illustrations of 1926 and the 16 full-page colored illustrations. Now I have found this 1931 edition, whose 160 pages render the full-page illustrations in black-and-white and are selective in the smaller illustrations that are included. There are significant stretches of fables toward the end with no illustration at all. Might this version be a cheaper post-stock-market-crash version? Pinterest shows many copies of the colored 1926 version but none of this 1931 version. As I have mentioned a propos of the other versions, one of Nézière's gifts is the inclusion of contemporary technology, from bicycle pumps to biplanes.