A New History of Blue Beard

Printed at Sidney’s Press in New Haven in 1806, adorned with cuts, and offered for the amusement of Little Lack Beard and his pretty sisters.

This is a chapbook: a cheap, thin, hand-illustrated popular book of the kind peddlers sold for pennies and children read to pieces. Thousands were printed in the early American republic. Very few survive.

The tale is Charles Perrault’s. A nobleman with a repellent blue beard marries a young wife, hands her the keys to his house, forbids her one small room, and leaves. But the names are not Perrault’s. Abomelique, Fatima, Irene and Selim came from a hit London stage melodrama of 1798, which is why this nursery book arrives complete with elephants, kettledrums and silken canopies. What a New Haven printer sold to American children was not the fairy tale out of the nursery but the fairy tale as it came back from the theater.

This Carrier Press Annotated and Illustrated Edition includes:

• The complete 1806 text with its original woodcuts, spelling and punctuation intact
• An original Introduction on chapbooks, Perrault, and how this version reached America
• Notes on the Text explaining the archaic words and the stage names
• A Reader’s Guide for families and classrooms

A note for grown-ups: this is a genuinely frightening old tale and it does not soften the forbidden room. Best read together.