Fables for the Times

A baa-sheep lies beneath a lion’s paw, with seconds to live—and asks his captor to sing Wagner. The lion’s vanity may be the sheep’s only escape.

In H. W. Phillips’s early-twentieth-century collection, familiar fable creatures enter a world where vanity can be a weapon and a moral may arrive with a sting. Lions, foxes, sheep, dogs, and asses meet dangers and temptations that sound remarkably human: a dog mistakes a reflection for a rival, while an ass discovers the peril of imitating someone else’s tricks. Phillips turns old fable machinery toward modern follies, puncturing pomposity with brisk dialogue and sly, sometimes outrageous morals. Here even wisdom may be absurd, and the supposedly foolish can have the last word. Which creature will outwit whom—and what lesson will the tale refuse to teach?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.