A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys

Published in 1851, this children's book frames six Greek myths as tales told by a young student, Eustace Bright, to children at a New England country house called Tanglewood. The stories recast Perseus and Medusa, Midas and the golden touch, Pandora's box, Baucis and Philemon, Bellerophon and the Chimera, and Hercules among the Pygmies. Between the tales, the children walk, play, and comment on the weather and the storyteller. Hawthorne softens violence and reshapes motive for a juvenile audience. The work is a sequence of retellings inside a domestic American frame, not a scholarly translation of the ancient sources.

Bound in pictorial marroon, cream and green cloth covers with gilt to spine. Cream endleaves printed with a green pattern. Dark red slipcase.