A Wonder-Book For Girls and Boys with a Mythological Index: Riverside Literature Series

Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1898 Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, MA. 1898. Hardcover. Riverside Literature Series Numbers 17 and 18. Reprint edition. Book is tight, square, and unmarked. Book Condition: Good; suntoning to spine; soiling to boards and spine; bumped lower tips; light shelfwear to head, tail, and tips. No DJ. Gray cloth boards and spine with black lettering and decorations on the spine; black lettering and black decorative borders on front board. Riverside book listings as endpapers. Clean interior. Interior hinges are sound and not split. 203 pp + 11 pp Index of Mythology 12mo. This book is a combination of the Riverside Literature Series Number 17 (A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys) and Number 18 (Tanglewood Tales). The stories in A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys are all stories within a story. The frame story is that Eunice Bright, a Williams College student, is telling these tales to a group of children at Tanglewood, an area in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Hawthorne lived for a time. All the tales are modified versions of ancient Greek myths. Hawthorne wanted to rewrite some of the Greek myths so they could be "taken out of the cold moonshine of classical mythology, and modernized, or perhaps gothicized, so that they may be felt by children of these days." This he later did in the form of a collection of six tales; "The Gorgon's Head", "The Golden Touch","The Paradise of Children","The Three Golden Apples","The Miraculous Pitcher", and "The Chimera". All six engraved pictures are present. A clean presentable copy.