🦄🧚🏼♀️🧜♀️
My Nana and Poppa had a copy of this book for most of my life and it's a probably one of the books I have read more than any other. I once saw a copy in a charity shop and for some reason I didn't buy it, something I regretted almost immediately. When I finally came across another copy a few weeks ago I got it right away.
The cover remains one of my absolute favourites and is painted by an artist called Scott Gustafson. I was obsessed with it when I was younger, and still love it now.
This book has a nice mix of Traditional Stories, Aesop's Fables, Grimms' Fairy Tales, Mother Goose's Nursery Rhymes, Children's Classics (extracts from Alice in Wonderland, Pinocchio, The Wind in the Willows, The Nutcracker and Peter Pan), Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses, American Tales, The Night Before Christmas and Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales.
The stories are nice, but it's the art that really makes it. There are sixteen different artists, and their work is still often the main image in my mind when I think of Goldilocks. Lynn Bywaters' illustrations for Snow White are more firmly embedded in my mind than even the Disney film.
It was wonderful to reread this and I like knowing that I now have my own copy that I can flip through whenever I feel like it.