Brer Rabbit Stories

Brer Rabbit Stories. Retold and illustrated by Rene Cloke. After the Uncle Remus tales of Joel Chandler Harris. London / Worksop: Award Publications Limited. Copyright 1982 by Award Publications Limited. This edition first published 1993. Printed in Singapore. ISBN 0-86163-689-9 / 9780861636891. Hardback. Pale pink laminated pictorial boards, issued without dust jacket. Colour illustrations throughout, including pictorial endpapers and a “This book belongs to” ownership page. Slim quarto picture-story format (about 24 pages of text and pictures. Publisher address on the copyright page: The Old Riding School, Welbeck Estate, Nr. Worksop, Nottinghamshire. Contents (four stories): Brer Fox and Mrs Goose The Moon in the Pond Brer Rabbit and the Honeypot Brer Wolf Breaks the Law The tales are rewritten in clear late-twentieth-century British English rather than Harris’s original dialect. Cloke relocates the action to an English countryside of red squirrels, frogs, kingfishers, bluebells, irises and bulrushes, while keeping the trickster plot of Brer Rabbit outwitting Brer Fox, Brer Wolf and Brer Bear. This title is the first of Award’s 1980s “Storytime Library” Brer Rabbit group; companion volumes include More Brer Rabbit Stories (ISBN 0-86163-690-2) and Hello Brer Rabbit. Illustrator Rene Cloke (Irene Mabel N. Cloke, Plymouth, 7 October 1904 – 1 October 1995) was a British children’s illustrator and greetings-card artist. During the Second World War she worked for the War Office as a tracer, drawing maps from aerial photographs for the RAF. After the war she spent the rest of her career on picture books and cards, known for fairies, elves, woodland animals and a habit of hiding faces in tree trunks. From the late 1970s she illustrated many titles for Award Publications, including Bible stories, fairy tales, Wind in the Willows adaptations, Enid Blyton reprints, and several Brer Rabbit collections (Brer Rabbit Stories and More Brer Rabbit Stories, both 1982; My Big Book of Brer Rabbit Stories, 1983; later colouring and puzzle books). Her Brer Rabbit pictures are fully coloured, costume-animal scenes rather than American plantation settings. Author / source Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908) collected and published the African-American trickster cycle as the Uncle Remus stories. This Award edition does not reprint Harris’s text; Cloke (or Award’s house adapter working with her pictures) retells four episodes for young British readers. Cataloguers variously enter the book under Cloke, Harris, or both. The copyright page of this copy credits Award Publications only. Condition Pink laminated boards with the Mrs Goose / Brer Rabbit cover scene. Binding sound. Ownership page unused. Light rubbing/bumping to corners and spine ends consistent with age; no dust jacket as issued. Please judge from the photographs. A complete, attractive copy of the 1993 Award reprint of Cloke’s 1982 Brer Rabbit picture book — the exact pink-board ISBN 0-86163-689-9 edition, not the later thicker “Favourite / My Best Brer Rabbit Stories” collections that reuse some of her art under different ISBNs (e.g. 9781782703303). …