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#CoolBooks #wish

"Did you not wish for anything then?" asked the goodwife. "No," said the man. "What was there to wish for?"

Alas, in Grimms' Fairy Tale, The Fisherman and His Wife, the greedy wife was not satisfied with her many wishes, each growing more and more elaborate, until the enchanted flounder has had quite enough. Fritz Kredal's illustrations & Shaun Tan's interpretation.

#CoolBooks #tower

"Rapunzel was the most beautiful child under the sun. When she was twelve years old, the witch shut her up in a tower which stood in a wood. It had neither staircase nor doors, but only a little window quite high up in the wall."

The tower I think of first when it comes to fairy tales. Illustration by Fritz Kredel.

#CoolBooks #spindle

There's Sleeping Beauty and Rumpelstiltskin, but my favorite spinning-related fairy tale is The Three Spinning Fairies because I liked this illustration of them--one with a big flat foot-from turning the wheel, one with a large underlip over her chin-from moistening the thread, & one with a very broad thumb-from twisting the thread. The spindle isn't mentioned specifically so I'll just assume it was there! 😆

#CoolBooks #wolf ?

As a child I found "The Wolf and the Seven Goats" to be one of the scariest Grimms' fairy tales. From the wolf masquerading as the nanny goat, to him eating the baby goats, to how they are rescued & how the wolf is dealt with in the end--it's all pretty dark. I found it scarier than Little Red Riding Hood even though the stories have lots of similarities & equally bad wolves! ?

Snagged most of these pics from the internet.

#CoolBooks #cottage

"There was once a poor window who lived alone in her hut with her two children, who were called Snow-White and Rose-Red, because they were like the flowers which bloomed on two rosebushes which grew before the cottage."

My book doesn't have a picture of the cottage, just Snow-White & Rose-Red with the bear, so I grabbed a few off of the internet.

#CoolBooks #slipper

I saw all the Disney movies & read/listened to the Disney Read-Along books before picking up Grimms' Fairy Tales, so I was shocked at the differences in the stories. In Cinderella, the evil stepsisters in the original story got creative with a knife to get the glass slipper to fit, leading to the doves' warning: "Prithee, look back, prithee, look back, There's blood on the track." Luckily there's no graphic illustrations!??

#CoolBooks #Beast

There are several beasts in Grimms' Fairy Tales--like wolves 🐺 and dragons. 🐉

#OldCoolBooks #spinefreezer

I think some of the darker Grimm's Fairy Tales are spine-freezers--and so many of them are pretty damn dark. I remember how much they scared me growing up between the stories and the pictures and usually read before bed. 😱😆This is one of the two Grimm's Fairy Tales books I have from my childhood. It was published in 1945 so well before I was born. It's beat up, but I love the illustrations. ❤️