The Yellow Fairy Book

The Yellow Fairy Book is a book by Andrew Lang, first published in 1894. Part of Lang’s famous coloured fairy-book series, this collection brings together a wide range of folk and fairy tales gathered from across Europe and beyond. The volume was prepared for a Victorian readership and reflects the era’s taste for carefully edited story collections: each tale is selected and retold with clarity and charm, and the book originally included numerous plates and in-text illustrations that helped fix these stories in the popular imagination.

The Yellow Fairy Book contains a lively mix of well-known and less familiar tales — from Andersen stories and continental folktales to narratives drawn from oral and literary traditions — making it a rich anthology for readers interested in classic fairy tales, children’s literature, and folklore. Its influence is still felt today: the Lang fairy books helped popularise the form of the fairy-tale anthology and remain an accessible introduction to traditional folk narratives for modern young readers and folklore enthusiasts alike.