Andrew Lang's Fairy Books or Andrew Lang's Coloured Fairy Books constitute a twelve-book series of fairy tale collections. Although Andrew Lang did not collect the stories himself from the oral tradition, the extent of his sources, who had collected them originally (with the notable exception of Madame d'Aulnoy), made them an immensely influential collection, especially as he used foreign-language sources, giving many of these tales their first appearance in English. As acknowledged in the prefaces, although Lang himself made most of the selections, his wife and other translators did a large portion of the translating and telling of the actual stories.
Lang's urge to collect and publish fairy tales was rooted in his own experience with the folk and fairy tales of his home territory along the English-Scottish border. At the time he worked, English fairy-tale collections were rare: Dinah Maria Mulock Craik's The Fairy Book (1869) was a lonely precedent. When Lang began his efforts, he was fighting against the critics and educationists of the day, who judged the traditional tales' unreality, brutality, and escapism to be harmful for young readers, while holding that such stories were beneath the serious consideration of those of mature age. [2] Over a generation, Lang's books worked a revolution in this public perception.
The series was immensely popular, helped by Lang's reputation in folklore, and by the packaging device of the uniform books. The series proved of great influence in children's literature, increasing the popularity of fairy tales over tales of real life.[3] It also inspired a host of imitators, like English Fairy Tales (1890) and More English Fairy Tales (1894) by Joseph Jacobs, and the American series edited by Clifton Johnson—The Oak-Tree Fairy Book (1905), The Elm-Tree Fairy Book (1909), The Fir-Tree Fairy Book (1912)—and the collections of Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora Archibald Smith, among others.
The first of his collections was the Blue Fairy Book (1889), for which Lang pulled together tales from the Brothers Grimm, Madame d
