Aesop's Fables: A New Translation Illustrated in Colour and Black & White by Arthur Rackham

London - New York: William Heinemann - Doubleday, Page & Co., 1912. 1912 at title page. Copyright page states "All Rights Reserved"; no other dates, indications. Olive green full cloth boards, gilt cover and spine design and titles,moderate cover, edge wear, rub. Front cover features stylized gilt titles and various animal characters and decoration. Spine features additional animals and titles in gilt. Back board feature blind-stamped Heinemann windmill emblem. Pages generally very good; moderate toning. Includes frontispiece plate with captioned tissue guard: "The Hare and the Tortoise." Mended closed tear to the "The Quack Frog," adjacent page 56. White pictorial endpapers repeat cover motif of animals in green outline. Dark green top-stain. Bind good, square; hinges intact. Superbly illustrated, decorated, and featuring a thoroughly enjoyable introduction by G. K. Chesterton. With thirteen richly colored, smooth coated plates by Arthur Rackham and over fifty black and white illustrations, many full-page, in immaculate detail throughout. Near very good first edition thus. Printed by Ballantyne & Company Ltd. at the Ballantyne Press, Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, London. 224 pages. Insured post. Aesop's Fables was first published in 1912 with this imagery by Rackham. Includes two-hundred fables of timeless humor and wisdom. "In Aesop's Fables Rackham's primary intention was to amuse, but his illustrations for fables of 'The Moon and her Mother' and 'The Gnat and the Lion' suggest the imaginative refinement that he brought to the task. Rackham was often his own model; there are several self-caricatures to be detected in Aesop's Fables. He is the man who catches the flea, the pompous gentleman who scolds the drowning boy, the credulous slave-owner who scrubs the black boy" (from Derek Hudson, Arthur Rackham His Life and Work). Aesop's Fables or the Aesopica is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and story-teller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 B.C. The first century A.D. philosopher, Apollonius of Tyana, is recorded as having said about Aesop: "Like those who dine well off the plainest dishes, he made use of humble incidents to teach great truths, and after serving up a story he adds to it the advice to do a thing or not to do it. Then, too, he was really more attached to truth than the poets are; for the latter do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable; but he by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events" (Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Book V).. First Edition. Hard Cover. Good. Illus. by Rackham, Arthur. 8vo - over 7¾ - 9¾" Tall.