The Book of Wonder and the Last Book of Wonder - Books That Inspired Tolkien: With Original Illustrations

A great book of fantasy stories and a classic of literature.

Print quality not great and the quality of the printed illustrations by Sidney Sime... which is what I bought it for, was unsatisfactory

Everything as advertised

"The Book of Wonder" is mostly ok as far as the editing goes, but "The Last Book of Wonder" is chock full of errors - missing words, missing punctuation, entire missing lines of text, sentences devolving into literal gibberish. By the second or third story of "The Last Book of Wonder", it becomes unreadable, the errors are too numerous and too egregious. Some stars because the first half of the volume is mostly ok, and the illustrations by Sidney Sime are great, but not too many because the shockingly poor quality of the editing in the second half of the volume is utterly inexcusable.

This really is an old fashion fairy tale book; the kind I used to read over 60 years ago. For myself, it is a book into my past as the style is quaint. I saw the inspiration for not only Tolkein but for all modern day fantasy writers. Of course, these stories had roots in much more ancient stories. Although the styles have changed throughout the years, the love of magic, the super real and the imagination remain alive as ever connecting the past with the future.