Extra, extra, read all about it! Wallace Irwin rewrites old fairy tales!
In contrast to Irwin’s Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum, whose humor is obscure to modern readers, his 1904 Fairy Tales Up-To-Now is fairly accessible. Irwin took standard fairy tales which everyone still knows today (Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, etc) and rewrote them in poetry, accompanied by hard-boiled newspaper headlines.
What I love best about Fairy Tales Up-To-Now is the unusual binding. The cover boards have been letterpress printed with actual newspaper articles—but without ink—resulting in a unique tactile feel. Paper labels were then pasted on top. The typography inside also mimics a newspaper look & feel.
Update, 2 Feb 2014: Today Priscilla Anne Lowry of Lowry-James Rare Books showed me two copies with different stamped text on the boards. I checked both my own copy and an online image, and all four copies are different. It remains to be seen how many different cover states exist.
Update, 18 Apr 2020: Molly Schwartzburg comments below about how each cover is probably “flong” (a negative mold) leftover from printing newspapers, making each cover unique.
