Every Little Mermaid Halloween cos-tume, every reference to “Ugly Duckling Syndrome,” and every use of “the Emperor’s New Clothes” as an idiom ultimately has its roots in the fairy tales of Hans Christian

-sen’s contemporary mythology is alive and well.

Sorry, kids, the Little Mer -maid does not live happi-ly ever after with Prince Charming--

Art book powerhouse Taschen pays hom-

Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, which features 23 of his beloved stories.

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the Pea, as well as lesser-known gems, like

(Andersen can even make a chicken coop dramatic) and Five Peas in a Pod(Anders-

10 Stunning Illustrations From Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales

en, apparently, had a thing for peas--they

-ful illustrations by famous artists from the 1840s to the 1980s, including Maurice Sen-dak, Kay Nielsen, and the eccentric Tom

are also newly commissioned silhouettes depicting characters and scenes from the stories. Yellow and red ribbon bookmarks give it the feel of a spell book that might be

apothecaries.Book editor Noel Daniel points out in her introduction that the Ugly Ducklingsto-ry was an apt parable for Andersen’s own rags-to-riches life. He was born into pov-erty in 1805 to a shoemaker father and a washerwoman mother and vowed in his diary, “I will become famous.” He made his way out of the slums of Odense, Denmark, by writing stories inspired women who had been committed to the local lunatic asy-lum, where Andersen’s grandmother was a gardener. Andersen would sit in the spin-ning room as the women spun both yarn

and stories, the latter of which were full of goblins, trolls, witches, and water spirits.“Andersen’s characters are humanlike in their passions as well as their frailties, and

unable to see their real fate or position, as if Andersen was shining a light on the limitations of our own human subjectivity,” Daniel writes. “In this way, perhaps the real subject of his tales is the inescapable condi-tion of subjectivity as the essence of human experience.”

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versions, pre-Disney airbrushing. Sorry, kids, the Little Mermaid does not live

she hurls herself into the ocean and turns

she must kill the prince if she wants to live. (But don’t worry. She eventually becomes a Daughter of the Air.)

stories all the more vital.

A NEW BOOK FEATURES THE MYSTI-CAL, DARK--AND UNEDITED--WORLD OF ANDERSEN VIA ILLUSTRATIONS FROM WORLD-FAMOUS ARTISTS

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