Fairy Tales Up-To-Now

Fairy Tales Up To Now cover
Typical cover of “Fairy Tales Up-To-Now”.

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.

Fairy Tales Up To Now title
Title page of “Fairy Tales Up-To-Now”

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.

Fairy Tales Up To Now p10
pages 10-11 of “Fairy Tales Up-To-Now”

 

Fairy Tales Up To Now p06
pages 6-7 of “Fairy Tales Up-To-Now”

1 thought on “Fairy Tales Up-To-Now”

  1. I do not believe that there are multiple “states” of this book, in the way you are using the term (to refer to the difference in content on the embossed covers). Each embossed cover is inherently unique, so there would be as many “states” as there were copies bound in this material. The embossed covers are unique because they were not produced for the book, but were, I believe, actual “flong,” leftovers from the production of actual newspaper pages.

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