Great Fairy Stories

Great Fairy Stories (c.1933)
Daily Sketch Publications | London
ISBN: none (issued in the golden age of “just give it a title and print it”)
Condition: Good as sold by Crappy Old Books

Once upon a time—the early 1930s, to be precise—the Daily Sketch decided that what the world really needed, between anxious headlines and adverts for patent tonics, was a large helping of fairy stories. Proper ones. With forests, curses, unlikely princes, morally instructive endings and the occasional talking animal with a strong union.

Thus was born Great Fairy Stories, a handsome blue hardback stuffed with tales that assume children can handle:

• wicked stepmothers,

• enchanted sleep,

• and the general risk of being turned into something horticultural.

What’s inside (besides spells and stepmothers)

This is a mixed treasury of classic fairy tales, likely including:

• the usual suspects from Grimm-ish and Andersen-ish territory –

  • princes who forget basic social skills,

  • girls who really shouldn’t trust old women offering fruit,

  • tailors, soldiers and wanderers who outsmart everyone with sheer cheek;

• plus a scattering of other favourites, retold in that brisk, early-20th-century English prose that assumes the reader is both sensible and slightly bloodthirsty.

The tone is delightfully pre-Disney:

• Romance, yes.

• Magic, yes.

• But also consequences.

Nobody here is worrying about whether the wolf’s traumatic backstory needs exploring.

The pictures (a.k.a. the real magic)

Illustrated by a small dream team of golden-age artists:

• T. H. Robinson

• W. H. Robinson

• R. Anning Bell

Which means:

• elegant line drawings,

• knights and maidens with unapologetically dramatic cloaks,

• forests that look properly dangerous,

• and castles that seem purpose-built for mood and echoing footsteps.

These aren’t cartoon doodles; they’re fully committed storybook artwork, the kind you could stare at for ages while putting off bedtime.

This particular copy

From the photo: a solid blue cloth hardback, clearly old enough to have heard several generations of “Just one more story, please.”

• Condition: Good – translated from Crappy Old Books dialect:

  • Binding firm, pages all present and not gnawed by anything mythical or otherwise.

  • Spine a bit faded and rubbed, as if it once spent years in bright nursery light.

  • Boards with light scuffing and a few small marks – call it vintage charm rather than damage.

  • Inside likely shows gentle age-toning but no catastrophic scribbles in crayon.

It won’t win any “as new” awards, but it gives off strong “beloved but respectable” energy.

Why you might actually want this

• You love old-school fairy tales with their original oddness still attached.

• You collect interwar children’s books and have a weakness for sturdy gift editions that once sat under Christmas trees between Meccano and socks.

• You are constitutionally unable to resist any book that combines:

  • blue cloth,

  • gilt-ish titles,

  • and multiple golden-age illustrators.

• You want a storybook that can be read aloud to modern children who’ve only known bowdlerised versions and are now ready for the real thing.

It also makes an excellent prop for your inner child: something to pull off the shelf when life is too full of emails and not enough fairy godmothers.

The vibe

Reading Great Fairy Stories feels like:

• Slipping back into a pre-digital universe where entertainment consisted of words, pictures and someone doing voices.

• Visiting a world where good and evil are not complicated, but the route between them absolutely is.

• Being reminded that wishes come true with alarming regularity—and often with paperwork attached.

It’s nostalgia without cynicism: sincere, magical, faintly alarming in the best fairy-tale way.

Condition vs. Enchantment

• Physically: Good – a few knocks to the cover, but the enchantment circuits are fully operational.

• Aesthetically: peak “granny’s best storybook,” the one you weren’t supposed to take to bed but did anyway.

• Emotionally: 100% capable of turning an ordinary evening into “and then the clock struck twelve…”

Offered by Crappy Old Books, where the spells are all in the text, the dragons are safely two-dimensional, the cloth is a little worn, and the fairy stories are still great—no reboot required.

Keep browsing: See more Fantasy books Other books by Daily Sketch Publications