The Wonderful Adventures of Paul Bunyan - The Heritage Press - First Edition Child Book, Kids Book - Everett Gee Jackson, Tall Tales

The Wonderful Adventures of Paul Bunyan published by The Heritage Press. The tall tales of a giant lumberjack named Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox.

Retold by Louis Untermeyer. Illustrated by Everett Gee Jackson. Published in 1973. The Heritage Press, Avon, Connecticut.

The Heritage Press was founded in 1935 by the Limited Editions Club to make high quality yet affordable editions of literary classics available to more readers. It was sold in 1970 and is no longer in business. The Heritage Club newsletter, Sandglass, which explains a book's publication history, is enclosed with this book.

A FOREWORD

"The soil of England bred young Jack, the little man who became the Giant Killer. The French climate produced the fearless Roland. Scandinavian streams quickened the blood of the heroic Beowulf. German forests poke through Siegfried and Baron Munchhausen, that magnificent liar. American soil and American spirit have created Paul Bunyan. ..."

PAUL'S BEGINNINGS

"Some of the old people say he was born in Maine. Some say in Minnesota. Or Michigan. There are even some who claim he came out of the pine woods of Canada. But they all agree that his name was Paul Bunyan, that he was the hero of the Northwest, and that he grew up to be the biggest thing in the whole country. How big was he? Well, the folks up in Maine say that when he was born, he outgrew his cradle before he was a week old."

The legend of the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan and his animal companion Babe the Blue Ox grew from tall tales told around the lumber camps of Canada and the northern United States. In these tales, the giant lumberjack created the Grand Canyon while walking with his ax dragging behind him; Mt. Hood is made from a pile of rocks he used to build a campfire; he and Babe created Minnesota's 10,000 lakes with their footprints. In 1916 freelance writer Walter Laughead popularized the story in a brochure for the Red River Lumber Company.

The Heritage Press wanted the story "told with due respect for the American legend involved in them, but with a richly comic pen and in a definitely poetic style."

They assigned the task to Louis Untermeyer (1885 - 1977), a poet, editor, and anthologist of many of the poetry collections that students of literature have read over the past 100 years.

Artist Everett Gee Jackson (1900 - 1995) was an impressionist painter and is remembered as a teacher of Pre-Columbian art at San Diego State University and founder of the Latin American Arts Committee of the San Diego Museum of Art. For his work on Paul Bunyan, he used crayon to simulate drawing on lithographic stone, which he didn't have access to in San Diego, in the basic colors of full-color reproductions.

Condition*: Fine/Near Fine. The slipcase has a small section of wear on a leading edge.

* Based on guidelines of the Independent Online Booksellers' Association.

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