Before You Begin

Before you begin.

Telling a story aloud is the oldest art there is. Long before there were books, there were tellers — the blind bard with his lyre, the traveller with a tale for his supper, the grandmother by the chimney-corner — and a ring of upturned faces held utterly still. Sara Cone Bryant spent years as one of those tellers, gathering children close on the schoolroom floor, and this little book, first published in 1905, is what she set down when mothers, teachers and librarians begged her to explain how it was done.

It is two books in one. The first half is a teacher's practical wisdom — how to choose a story worth telling, how to shape it for the ear, and how to tell it so simply and so vividly that it ends, as she says, “with a snap.” The second half is a treasury: the best-loved tales themselves — The Three Bears, The Ugly Duckling, The King of the Golden River, and many more — selected and adapted, ready to be told. Through it all Bryant leans on the great tellers before her, from Homer to Andersen, and on the kindergarten teachers who first saw that a story is not idle amusement but food for a child's spirit.

Her one rule beneath all the others is this: a story's purpose is to give joy — and in and through that joy, to stir and feed the life of the spirit. You cannot give a story, she insists, unless you first feel it yourself.

This illustrated edition opens the book into a gallery of plates: the masters whose art Bryant distils, the ideas at the heart of her method, and the beloved tales she teaches with, each brought to life. Turn the page, gather close, and learn the oldest art of all — how to tell a story so a child leans in and forgets the world.