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Fairy Tales in Italy and France

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Your favorite fairy tale

Perrault's “Sleeping Beauty”: 1 votes (50%)
Basile's “Sapia Licarda”: 0 votes (0%)
Straparola's “Cesarino, the Dragon-Slayer”: 1 votes (50%)
Lhéritier's “The Discreet Princess: 0 votes (0%)
Basile's “The Flea”: 0 votes (0%)
D’Aulnoy's “The Dolphin”: 0 votes (0%)
Straparola's “Pietro the Fool”: 0 votes (0%)
Murat's “The Pig King”: 0 votes (0%)
Carter's “Puss-in-Boots”: 0 votes (0%)
Lhéritier's “The Discreet Princess: 0 votes (0%)
Total Votes: 2

Fairy Tales at CU Boulder

The Rare Books Collection at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Norlin Library (part of the Libraries' Rare and Distinctive Collections) houses a remarkable collection of fairy tales, consisting of some 2000 books. This outstanding collection includes a fascinating variety of materials: early modern printed books intended for adult readers; lavishly illustrated children’s books; nineteenth-century chapbooks that cost just a penny; anthologies of fairy tales from around the globe; and stereoscopic viewing cards. It is not only a treasury of tales to be read, studied, and enjoyed but also a vibrant museum that documents the visual tradition of fairy tales. Patrons can explore and compare illustrations of classic tales like Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, and Puss in Boots in images as diverse as 17th-century French woodcuts, engravings by 19th-century masters like Gustave Doré and George Cruikshank,  richly colored images by renowned 20th-century fairy tale illustrators Edmund Du Lac, Kay Nielsen, Arthur Rackham, and contemporary artists and photographers’ books.

The database Fairy Tales at CU Boulder makes this wonderful collection more accessible by allowing users to conduct more finely tuned searches based, for example, on tale type (e.g., Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast) or a keyword (e.g., ring, dragon). Summaries of the tales and notes on interesting aspects of the particular version of the tale or its illustrations accompany each entry.  Links to digitized versions of the tales allow readers to preview texts (if the work is digitized). 

This ongoing project is built with student-submitted content and involves the work of both undergraduates and graduate students under the direction of Sean Babbs (Instruction Coordinator for the Libraries' Rare and Distinctive Collections) and Suzanne Magnanini (Associate Professor of Italian and President's Teaching Scholar). CU Art Museum Curator Hope Saska trained students in Visual Thinking Strategies. It has been supported by UROP, ASSETT’s Innovation Incubator, the President’s Teaching Scholar’s Program, and the CU Boulder Libraries.

Historical and Illustrated Fairy Tales Collection "Once Upon a Time" includes a sampling of fairy tales from the collection housed in UCB Libraries' Special Collections Department. Covering a three hundred year time frame, the print collection encompasses European, American, and Asian tales, including several rare editions by Charles Perrault, Mme d'Aulnoy, Giovanni Straparola and the Brothers Grimm as well as the illustrator Arthur Rackham.

Fairy Tales Around the World

Fairy Tales Artistic Expressions

Frontal photo of castle Neuschawanstein in summer time.

Castle Neuschwanstein, Germany

Image used under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0.

Marta Shmatava 2010 Fairy tale

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License...

Sleeping beauty dress on a pink dress with two maidens seated on the floor, one dressed in green and the other dressed on gray. Print : lithograph, hand-colored

The Sleeping Beauty

Print : lithograph, hand-colored, c1919. No known restrictions on publication. 

Black and white painting displays two girl listening while a woman read a book.

Fairy Tales

Photograph of a painting signed "J. Shannon, 1896" at Metropolitan Museum of Art. No known restrictions on publication.

Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella

1997 film Directed by Robert Iscove.