"Aesop's Fables" illustrated by Arthur Rackham William Heinemann - 1912, first UK Rackham edition - 224p, 18cmx15cm - 12 colored plates + colored frontispiece and b/w illustrations by Arthur Rackham - condition: good, in original publisher green gilt binding, with rubbing and soiling to boards and spine, inscriptions to ffep, some wrinkling, complete with all plates by Rackham, housed in mylar cover The peculiar secret of Rackham's success in seizing upon the essence of the human and portraying it in animal form, which is after all the basic device of the morality, is unwittingly touched upon in Chesterton's delightful introduction to the 1912 edition of Aesop's Fables: 'There can be no good fable with human beings in it. There can be no good fairy tale without them'. Rackham's genius is such that it bridges the two, and carries the didactic fable into the realm of fairy story, and lends to the imaginative world of fairies a tangible and convincing reality" (Fred Gettings, Arthur Rackham, 1976, pp. 83-4).