Folk-Tales of Bengal

Complete and unabridged, with 29 full-page plates by Giotto, Simone Martini and Duccio di Buoninsegna. Bengali village tales taken down from the tellers - the match-making jackal, the ghost who was afraid of being bagged, the boy with the moon on his forehead. Lal Behari Day had put a village story-teller, Sambhu's mother, into his novel of peasant life; here he set down the tales themselves, as the old women of Bengal told them, before they went out of the villages. Twenty-nine plates of painting, from Giotto to Signorelli, carry the sacred themes of Trinity, Annunciation and Last Judgement that echo the moral world of these Bengali tales.