How my collection started: a very personal story

Like many people, I grew up with Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. Only now though, after 20 years of being an Andersen enthusiast and 10 years of professionally studying literature, I can fully appreciate how lucky I was with those two plain paperbacks – Andersen’s selected fairy tales, volumes 1 and 2. One was red and one was green, cheap paper smelled with dust and glue, and both things got read into tatters as quickly as only The Lord of the Rings would afterwards. The thing is, the Russian texts were really, really good. Now, having read the originals, I am able to applaud the translators, but when a child, the spell simply worked on me. Most children’s editions have colourful illustrations but only simplified retellings of what Andersen had written: they are stripped of the magic of the words.