THE NIGHTINGALE and other Tales

1846. ["The Emperor's New Clothes"] Translated by Charles Boner with Numerous Illustrations by the Count Pocci. London: Joseph Cundall, 1846. Original blind-stamped blue morocco-grain cloth.

First Edition in English of this group of fairy tales -- one of three different groups of Andersen tales accomplished in 1846 by three different translators and three different London publishers. The nine tales in this edition are "The Nightingale," "The Buckwheat," "The Fellow-Traveller," "The Resolute Leaden Soldier," "The Flying Trunk," "The Garden of Paradise," "The Wild Swans," "The Emperor's New Clothes" and "Ole Lucköie." The first-published of the three, earlier in 1846, was Andersen's first book in English -- Chapman & Hall's WONDERFUL STORIES FOR CHILDREN (translated by Mary Howitt though misspelling the author's last name); it did not do well, largely because both this Cundall group of tales, and William Pickering's DANISH FAIRY TALES AND LEGENDS (translated without credit by Caroline Peachey) came out soon after. The C&H group generally did not include any of the tales for which Andersen is known today; the only C&H tales reappearing in this Cundall volume are "The Constant Tin Soldier" [sic], "The Garden of Paradise" and "Ole Lucköie." "The Wild Swans" and "The Emperor's New Clothes" first appeared both in the Pickering volume and in this Cundall volume (the precedence between those two is unknown). Included are four plates plus numerous chapter head-pieces and tail-pieces by "the Count Pocci" (Franz Graf von Pocci, an artist, writer and composer who was also an official in the court of King Ludwig of Bavaria). This volume is still in the original blue cloth, and is in very good-plus condition (little soil or wear, though the volume is recased, preserving the original pale-yellow endpapers with reinforcing strips at the gutters). In our experience, this Cundall edition is the scarcest of the three 1846 collections of tales. See Quayle CHILDREN'S p. 40.