The first book is by Melinda Lilly: Spider and His Son Find Wisdom: An Akan Tale.
The illustrations are by the marvelous Charles Reasoner, whose distinctive style you might recognize from earlier posts, and you can see more blog posts about Melinda Lilly and Charles Reasoner; they are two of my favorites!
The second book is about greedy Anansi: Anansi and the Pot of Beans by Bobby and Sherry Norfolk:
The illustrations are by Baird Hoffmire, and Grandma Spider is one of the characters, as you can see here:
The third book is a fascinating experiment in storytelling as illustrated by Janice Skivington: How Anansi Obtained the Sky God's Stories: An African Folktale from the Ashanti Tribe; the story text is by Donna Lanette Washington.
In this book, the pages have illustrations only. There are no words, but you can find the text of the story on a single page in the back of the book. The idea is to use the illustrations as storytelling prompts, for parents or teachers or some older reader to engage interactively in telling the story with a young reader. So for example, here is Anansi bringing the snake to the Sky-God. Because I know this story very well (having read many different versions of it from many different sources), I know I would enjoy telling the story to someone with this beautiful art to prompt me:
In addition to the text of the book in the back, you can also find out more information about the storyteller and illustrator:
So, enjoy! And I'll be back with more stories from western Africa tomorrow, all just a click away, thanks to the Internet Archive.
by Melinda Lilly
by Bobby and Sherry Norfolk
by Donna Lanette Washington and Janice Skivington
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