Thursday, November 18, 2021

Africa at the Internet Archive: Native Fairy Tales of South Africa

Today I want to feature another public domain book; this is one that had been missing from Internet Archive for some reason, but I had a copy of the Google-digitized PDF, so I uploaded that to Internet Archive, and it's available there now too: Native Fairy Tales of South Africa by Ethel L. McPherson, published in 1919:


As the author explains in the introduction, these are Zulu stories from Callaway's collection and Sotho stories from Jacottet's collection that she has retold for children. I've written about both of those books previously at this blog: Callaway's Nursery Tales, Traditions, and Histories of the Zulus and Jacottet's The Treasury of Basuto Lore, both of which are online at the Internet Archive.


What makes this book really remarkable is that it has illustrations by Helen Jacobs, a well-known children's book illustrator who was born in 1888 and died in 1970; you can find out more about her life and work here: Helen Jacobs

Jacobs illustrated four stories in the book, and they are each quite beautiful:





Now that I've learned how to create my own PDF-anthologies by copying-and-pasting pages from PDFs, I'll be able to create a PDF anthology of African folktales with illustrations. The four illustrated stories from this book will certainly be a part of that, along with the illustrated stories in Andrew Lang's books that I featured yesterday. I am really excited about being able to create these specialized public domain anthologies AND to share them via the Internet Archive. 

Meanwhile, here's McPherson's book, full of stories to read and enjoy:

by Ethel L. McPherson



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