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Hardcover. Condizione: Fine. 1st Edition. Fine condition beige and brown color illustrated boards/salmon cloth spine/maroon spine lettering. Also includes the original clear good condition onion skin dust wrapper. All pages are in fine condition and the spine is exceedingly tight and square. Translated by Thomas James Arnold from the original German poem Reineke Fuchs by J.W. von Goethe. Also includes a new introduction by Edward Lazare. Illustrated with wood engravings by Fritz Eichenberg. First Edition thus. "The Story of Reynard the Fox probably goes back to man's first epochal awareness that he could make things grow in the ground and that he could force living creatures to do his bidding and to line his larder. Not the first fox, but some uncounted descendant of the first fox, peered from cover at the first farm and found it good, and immediately thereafter the first theft of a pullet from a man-made roost initiated a chain of depredation whereof the links are still being forged. Clever, these foxes! And man, the victim (after the pullet), could not withhold his admiration even while he totted up his losses (assuming that, by this time, he had made the equally epochal discovery that one and one make two). Out of his admiration developed a story-cycle that must have grown into uncountable chapters before there was a written alphabet, let alone a printing press. Jacob Grimm, the elder of the fairy-tale-collecting brothers, traced the fox sequence back to the eighth century in his area of Germany, but he knew that he was still far from the beginning. And, looking in the other direction, we are certainly still far from the end. The story of Reynard, indeed, is so hardy, so time-resistant, so universal that it has come to represent the bestiary in the same manner that Hamlet has come to represent tragedy or Babe Ruth has come to represent baseball. A bestiary is simply an animal story told by people, and since people know people better than they know animals, the narrator of a bestiary invariably endows his animal characters with human attributes, both pleasant and unpleasant, with the accent on the unpleasant. We try it, as the saying is, on the dog, or, as in the present instance, on the fox. All of us have been weaned on bestiaries - Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots, the Three Bears, Ferdinand, Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories and Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus tales, whereof the protagonists, it will be recalled, are Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Fox. The saga of Reynard goes marching on.- Excerpt from the Introduction by Edward Lazare. Eichenberg, Fritz (illustratore). …