Hans Christian Andersen, Andersen's Fairy Tales (New York, Doubleday Junior Deluxe Edition, 1956). Hardcover, no dust jacket. Debossed spot color illustrations by Leonard Weisgard on the front and back covers on a light gray cloth board. Green cloth board spine with black printed lettering and two more spot illustrations. 217 pp. 8.5" x 5.5" with a red top edge (slightly faded) and deckled fore-edge. Very good condition.

This volume is one of a series published between the mid-1940s and mid-1960s by publishers Nelson Doubleday. Founded in 1897, mergers made the original Doubleday & McClure the largest publisher in America as Doubleday, Page & Co, and, as Doubleday, Doran, the largest in the English-speaking world by 1927.

By the 1980s Douleday had not only become a diversified media company, it owned the New York Mets. The Doubleday family sold the publishing business to Bertelsmann in 1986, where it became part of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group. In 2008 it was merged with Knopf to become Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House.

The volume contains eight of the best-loved stories of the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), illustrated by Leonard Weisgard (1916-2000). One of the most celebrated illustrators of the latter half of the 20thC, Weisgard was the legendary collaborator with Margaret Wise Brown in over a dozen best-sellers. He married a Dane in 1950, and moved to Andersen's homeland for the rest of his life.

The Junior Deluxe Classics were a mail-order book-club offering, with over ninety titles published in the series. They offered uniform designs and external/end pages- styles of illustrations, and are coming back into vogue as a legacy collectible from the first decades of the Baby Boomer Era,

HBB's Price: $10.