A Book of Magical Beasts

by Ruth Manning-Sanders, Raymond Briggs (Illustrator)

Genres: Childrens

244 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Ruth Manning-Sanders, youngest daughter of an English minister, describes her childhood as “extraordinarily happy. . . with kind and understanding parents and any amount of freedom.” She read omnivorously, and she and her two sisters wrote and acted their own plays. A Shakespeare scholar at Manchester University, she later married Cornish artist George Manning-Sanders. They began married life in a horse drawn caravan, and traveled to all parts of the British Isles.
Mrs. Manning-Sanders has collected folk and fairy stories from around the world and she published more than 90 books during her lifetime.

Reviews

[Mary Catelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

An atypical book for her, though they are all of magical beasts.

Several of them are purely literary, such as one from E. Nesbit that fractures the dragon and princess tale, and an excerpt from Prince Prigio. Some are poems. But a fair number are folks tales, like one about the mischievous Hedley Kow, the Golden Crab who married a princess, the frog at the Well at the World's End, and more.

[Ashley Lambert-Maberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

All her books are splendid, I have no favourites really. The illustrations are perfectly suited, and I appreciate how she pulls her tales from several different cultures. I adored these as a child, and have read them to my children, and they hold up well.

(Note: I'm a writer, so I suffer when I offer fewer than five stars. But these aren't ratings of quality, they're a subjective account of how much I liked the book: 5* = an unalloyed pleasure from start to finish, 4* = really enjoyed it, 3* = readable but not thrilling, 2* = disappointing, and 1* = hated it.)