Aesop’s Fables by Martin West (review)

Elegant, spare prose and stunning, imaginative illustrations breathe new life into old tales in this collection of Aesop’s fables. The book opens and reads vertically, rather than the standard horizontal approach of most picture books; each story is illustrated with a full-page scene and smaller, related spot art clustered around the text, a layout kept airy by snowy white space, a subtle palette, and a slender, refined font. Many of the compositions employ unusual perspectives or intriguing details: in “The Lion and the Mouse,” for example, it’s not only the lion hanging in a net; there are also nets containing a fish, a butterfly, and a man reading a newspaper. In “The Fox and the Grapes,” a dreamy, Magritte-like scene depicts the titular fox hovering above the floor in a forest-green room in which a plate floats above a checkered table, clouds drift through the windows, and the grapes sprout downward from the ceiling. The selected fables range from the well-known (“The Tortoise and the Hare,” “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse”) to the more obscure (“The Ox and the Frog,” “The Stag at the Pool”). The morals are interpolated explicitly or implicitly into the fables themselves rather than being easily identifiable taglines, but adults and kids with previous Aesop experience can easily bridge that gap if they wish, and the pictures are definitely worth the price of admission.