Wednesday, November 17, 2021

Africa at the Internet Archive: Andrew Lang's African Folktales

For today's public domain item, I have something really cool that I created and uploaded to Internet Archive myself: I took the 25 African folktales from the Andrew Lang "Fairy Books" -- specifically, the Pink, Grey, Violet, Crimson, Brown, Orange, Olive and Lilac Fairy Books -- and I combined them into a single document. The final result is a book that Andrew Lang didn't publish himself, but he could have... and you'll find it online at the Internet Archive now, available to ready there or to download yourself as a PDF: over 300 pages of biblio-remix!

by Andrew Lang


The collection is organized by the year of publication (starting with the Pink Fairy Book in 1897 and ending with the Lilac Fairy Book in 1910), but I also included a listing in the table of contents based on Andrew Lang's sources: Basset's Contes Berberes, Jacottet's Contes Populaires des Bassoutos, Junod's Etude Ethnographique sur les Baronga, Monteil's Contes Soudainais, Steere's Swahili Tales, and von Stumme's Märchen und Gedichte aus der Stadt Tripolis.As you can see, Lang's sources were very limited (nothing from western or central Africa at all), but he did rely on some German and French language sources that are not readily available in English, so that makes his publication of those stories especially useful.  Some (but not all) of Basset, Jacottet, and Junod's work has been translated into English, but not von Stumme or Monteil. 

Plus, now that this "book" is at Internet Archive, it has all the usual advantages of Internet Archive books: it's searchable, for example. Here are all the lions!



There is also some wonderful artwork in these books; Henry Justice Ford did all of the illustrations, and some of the illustrations are really wonderful. I've included a few of my favorites below, and you can see all the Ford illustrations on a single page also.




I learned some nifty PDF tricks in preparing this composite PDF, and perhaps I will try some similar "PDF anthologies" in the future, drawing on previously published material in the public domain like this. I've got literally thousands of public domain PDFs bookmarked at Internet Archive, books full of folktales and fairy tales, and some beautiful artwork too, and now I have a new way to re-use that material!

Especially for all you teachers out there: if you are working with public domain materials or CC-licensed materials that you have access to in PDF format, maybe you will want to try your own mix-and-match PDF publishing, using the Internet Archive to share your creations with the world. I've often said that I'd love a kind of "playlist-creator" for texts that has the same flexibility and power of playlist software that we have for music or album software that we have for photos... until someone creates beautiful software like that for us, poking around with PDF pages is the next-best thing I can think of. It was fun, and the end product is something that, at least for me, is really useful!


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