Aesop's Fables

Abstract

This seems a larger version of the 2009 book with a similar monochrome cover showing a cat and a tree against a clouded sky. This is the green book, that one the red. The difference seems to be that here there are not 243 fables but rather 363, not 256 pages but 377. That is, there is half again as many pages and fables here as in that 2009 edition. There is the same design for The Crab and His Mother, this time on 59. There is again a T of C at the beginning. As is frequent in present-day Chinese paperbacks, text-page foredges are decorated with an identical repeating pattern and the covers are heavy paper folded back to create a flap. Here those elements are identical with those in the 2009 edition. As in that book, the page layout of this book uses a distinctive format. The title of the fable in English is at the top center of each page around a design and set of Chinese characters. A consecutive number of this fable and its title in Chinese and in English is centered above three elements. First, at the left, there is a standard design including two Chinese characters inside of circles; around these are animals and human figures in silhouette. To the right of this standard element is a set of about three to six lines of Chinese characters. Under that text is the English text of the fable. At the outside bottom is a page number in a circle with a printer's design outside of that circle. As in that book, the texts here seem to be taken from the Joseph Jacobs edition of 1894. There are a few printer's designs along the way, perhaps echoing the particular fable.