African Folktales at Internet Archive: Adventures of Spider

It's hard to believe it's already Week 8 of this book recommendation adventure... and there are still so many books I want to recommend! This week, I'll shift over to West Africa with books that focus on the tricksters Spider (Anansi) and Tortoise (Ajapa). 

For today, it's Anansi in two books by Joyce Cooper Arkhurst with illustrations by Jerry Pinkney, both books just a click away at Internet Archive. The first book,  The Adventures of Spider: West African Folktales, appeared in 1964:

Then, there was a follow-up volume, More Adventures of Spider, which appeared in 1972:

The author of both books, Joyce Cooper Arkhurst, collected these Ananse stories in western Africa, mostly in Ghana. Here's a blurb from the back of the 1972 book with a photo. 

You might remember the illustrator, Jerry Pinkney, from last week; his beautiful art appears in a book about an east African trickster: Rabbit Makes a Monkey of Lion. Here you can see the trickster Rabbit talking with Bush-Rat and with another trickster, Tortoise:

Doing illustrations of Spider is a big challenge for artists, much more so than for other tricksters like Rabbit or Tortoise, and you can see a big shift in Pinkney's illustrations between the two books. Both books have marvelous artwork, but it's really in the later book that you see more of what became Pinkney's own distinctive style.

So, for example, here are Pinkney's illustrations for the famous story of Anansi and the pot of wisdom in the book from 1964, which was the first book that Pinkney illustrated! (You can read about his long career here at HistoryMakers and also at Wikipedia.) This is Anansi with the pot, and then Anansi trying to climb a tree so that he can hide the pot from everyone else:

Meanwhile, these illustrations come from the 1972 book, and you can see that Pinkney had by then evolved his own beautiful, distinctive style. This illustration shows Anansi underwater as he tries to get to the island of coconuts:

This illustration is from a story about Tree Bear and Anansi taking their dispute to the chief for judgment:

Beautiful!

So, if you have heard about Anansi and were always curious just what he's all about, these two books are a great place to start. :-)

 The Adventures of Spider:

West African Folktales

by Joyce Cooper Arkhurst

with illustrations by Jerry Pinkney

More Adventures of Spider

by Joyce Cooper Arkhurst

with illustrations by Jerry Pinkney