Stories from the Arabian Nights. Retold by Laurence Houseman. With Drawings by Edmund Dulac. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1930. (Boots Issue). Pp 319. Small folio. Original gilt titled russet cloth, in  pictorial dust jacket. Neat gift inscription to front free endpaper. A nice bright copy.

Dulac’s twenty tipped-in coloured plates capture perfectly the exotic narratives of these Arabian folk tales. The collection includes Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba & the Forty Thieves, The Sleeper Awakened and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp.

Edmund Dulac (1882-1953) was a French book illustrator prominent during the so called Golden Age of Illustration (the first quarter or so of the twentieth century).

Other well known titles illustrated by him include an edition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1908), The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales (1910), and Stories from Hans Christian Andersen (1911).