TALES AS OLD AS TIME

Once upon a time, there was a girl who spent her days surrounded by fairy tales. Pinocchio, Bluebeard, Snow White and Rose Red - these characters populated her bedtime stories, the movies she watched, even the pictures on her wall. But most of all, she read about them. Every book she could find that mentioned princesses or monsters or pixies, she read cover to cover. Andersen, Grimm, Disney, and Villeneuve were some of her earliest teachers and sources of comfort. When she had difficult times in her own life, the tales showed her either that things could always be worse, or that happily ever after could be found with a little kindness, determination, and hope... 

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I have always been an avid reader; I found myself getting lost in stories more often than not. My childhood favorites were works of fantasy and legend, from Greek myths to Arthuriana to fairy tales. As I got older, instead of leaving these stories behind as many people do, I became more enamored with them. 

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In high school, I researched the math hidden in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In college, I wrote papers on topics like representations of Biblical Eve in The Little Mermaid. In graduate school, my concentration was fairy tales and folklore in popular culture; I wrote essays about how the early Disney Princess films reflected changing expectations of women, and how Celtic myth and Catholicism melded to form a folkloric tradition unique to Ireland. I have a true and abiding love of fairy tales, which is part of the reason I collect them.

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The collection focuses primarily on fairy tales that could be considered "cultural and historical touchstones" - those materials, whether it be the stories within or the physical object, that communicate something specific about the time or place they come from, or who told them. For example, the Cabinet de Fées, a 41-volume anthology of tales by French salonnières in the 17th and 18th centuries, sits alongside Hasegawa's crepe paper books, a collaboration between Japanese artists and the Tokyo expat community in the late-19th/early-20th century.

 

My collection includes individual tales, anthologies, children's books, plays, ephemera, pantomime books, manuscripts, graphic novels, academic works, and even self-help books. There is a book once owned by a princess, and another written in a POW camp during WWI. Many were written to preserve culture, a pursuit that is complicated by the fact that some were done so by colonizers or missionaries. The collection spans the 18th-21st centuries, and includes contemporary retellings and new publications that often flip the classics on their heads. There is also a particular focus on fairy tales as stories by women, for women, as the female storytellers were often overshadowed by their more famous male counterparts in the Western canon. Though the bulk of materials are in English, I also have works in German, French, Hebrew, Ladino, Chinese, and Japanese. In addition to books and ephemera, the collection includes artwork, fashion, and merchandise.

 

I was the winner of the 2022 California Young Book Collector's Prize and a 2020 Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize honorable mention. I have given talks about collecting fairy tales to the Zamorano Club and at the Rare Books LA book fair. I am beyond thrilled to present my collection here, and look forward to expanding it in the years to come.