ABSTRACT
There are literally hundreds of books of traditional tales for sale. So how do teachers select from so many? Elizabeth Cook’s The Ordinary and the Fabulous (1971) and Mary Steele’s Signal Book guide Traditional Tales (second edition 1989) both have a deserved place on my bookshelf, but books go out of print and new ones appear and so the publication of Booktrust’s Folk and Fairy Tales: A Book Guide by Deborah Hallford and Edgardo Zaghini in 2005 was welcome. For an historical account which explores whether ‘the authenticity and the art of the storyteller’ can be preserved in fairy tales published today, you cannot do better than read Brian Alderson’s article ‘Fairy Tales in the New Millennium’ in Books For Keeps (Alderson, 2001).
