Plucking the book, long lost now, from that shelf remains among the clearest of my memory shards. Enticing, no? And so, like Dorothy opening the door of her house after it landed on a witch in Oz, I opened the Yellow Fairy Book and proceeded to lose myself in tales of dragons, witch-maidens, a glass mountain, and the occasional nixy. The cover, however, though faded, beckoned. Down a row of books I went, pulling, examining, rejecting, putting back, until I came to a volume so worn and tired (used and loved) that the printing on the spine was unreadable. If memory serves (sometimes it does), I was 10 years old and searching for something to read.
It is a much healthier twin to the battered and tattered volume I discovered on a shelf of my mother’s bookcase around 1954. There it is, offered for sale on ebay, a bargain at $400, an 1894 first edition copy of Andrew Lang’s Yellow Fairy Book.
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