Illustrating Aesop 3
(2025, 176 pages with dozens in colour, $19.95, 6 inches wide by 8.75 inches high, printed in Toronto on beautiful laid paper

Welcome to a third helping of Aesop's fables, rounding off the trilogy and highlighting the usual array of vain peacocks, devious foxes, peremptory lions and nervous rabbits. The fables are retold in verse by Warren Clements and illustrated by more than thirty artists, including Arthur Rackham, Boris Artzybasheff, Edward Detmold and Walter Crane. The camel dances, the ant argues with the fly, the astronomer tumbles into a well and two rabbits debate whether they are being chased by greyhounds or beagles. Most of the morals apply as keenly today they did a couple of thousand years ago. In The Lion's Share (the source of that expression), might makes right. In "The Naïve Mouse", a mouse learns that appearances can deceive (and lives to tell about it, which can't be said of every Aesop creature).

Fortune and the Traveller

A traveller needed to sleep for a spell.
Fatigued, he lay down on the lip of a well.
Dame Fortune appeared, shook his shoulders and said,
"If you moved half an inch, you would fall and be dead.
And who would be blamed by the folks left behind?
Dame Fortune, that's who. They are always inclined
To attribute to me what their carelessness brings.
Your fate is your call. I do not pull the strings."


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