Andrew Lang

Lang was a poet, a classicist who translated Homer into English prose, an anthropologist who argued with Frazer about the origins of religion, a historian of Scotland, and a working critic who reviewed for decades. He is remembered for none of it. He is remembered for twenty-five coloured fairy books, published between 1889 and 1913, which taught the English-speaking world most of the folk tales it knows.

The credit for those has always been wrong, and he said so himself. His wife, Leonora Blanche Alleyne, took editorial charge of the series in the 1890s and did the bulk of the work — translating and adapting from French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish and Catalan, with a team of collaborators who were mostly women. Andrew selected, prefaced, and put his name on the spine.

In the preface to The Lilac Fairy Book in 1910 he wrote that the books "have been almost wholly the work of Mrs. Lang", and described the arrangement with more accuracy than modesty: "My part has been that of Adam ... in the Garden of Eden. Eve worked, Adam superintended." A century of covers has quietly ignored him.