"Life itself is the best fairy tale," Hans Christian Andersen once said, the man who recognized magic in every story he laid eyes on. Under this premise he recounted in writing more than one hundred and fifty lives, establishing himself as one of the best storytellers of all time and, for generations, feeding the oral tradition with lively narratives full of enchantment.

In 1916 the English publisher George G. Harrap & Co. brought together some of Andersen's stories and commissioned Harry Clarke, a twenty-seven-year-old young man who was already standing out on the art scene thanks to his masterful technique in stained glass Cuentos de hadas saw the light with an extraordinary first edition of only one hundred and twenty-five copies, numbered and signed by the artist, which earned him worldwide recognition in the publishing field. Thus, just a year later, he would illustrate Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Imagination and Mystery (Libros del Zorro Rojo, 2009), considered one of the bibliographic jewels of the time, and in 1925 it would be the turn of Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (LZR, 2012).

These classics came to life through his pen, in plates that passed into posterity thanks to his avant-garde, dark style full of details. We recover, to the delight of readers large and small, this historic edition of Cuentos de hadas, never before published in Spanish, with the award-winning translation by Enrique Bernárdez. In it you can find such famous stories as "The Ugly Duckling", "The Match Girl", "Thumbelina" or "The Little Mermaid", always narrated with that mixture of realism and fantasy so characteristic of the Danish writer.

Sadness, loneliness, love, ambition and courage come together in Andersen's stories as games of light and shadow that parade before the reader, displaying a sensitivity typical of children's stories and likely to dazzle adults in charge as well. to read them.