# Is "Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des Moralitez (Perrault's fairy tales / Mother Goose)" by Charles Perrault a First Edition?

> **Quick answer.** A first edition of Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des Moralitez (Perrault's fairy tales / Mother Goose) by Charles Perrault (Claude Barbin, Paris, 1697) is identified by: Paris: Claude Barbin, 1697; in-12, anonymous, containing the eight prose tales (La Belle au bois dormant, Le Petit chaperon rouge, La Barbe bleue, Le Maistre chat ou le chat botté, Les Fées, Cendrillon, Riquet à la Houppe, Le Petit Poucet). The Barbin Paris 1697 is the true first and the census claim is correct; the 1695 calligraphic manuscript (five tales) precedes it but is not an edition.

**Checklist — a true first has these:**
- Paris: Claude Barbin, 1697; in-12, anonymous, containing the eight prose tales (La Belle au bois dormant, Le Petit chaperon rouge, La Barbe bleue, Le Maistre chat ou le chat botté, Les Fées, Cendrillon, Riquet à la Houppe, Le Petit Poucet)
- Look for the engraved frontispiece signed by Antoine Clouzier — three children before a peasant woman spinning, with the placard lettered 'contes de ma mère Loye' — plus a copper-engraved vignette at the head of the dedicatory epistle and at the head of each tale
- The dedicatory epistle to Mademoiselle (Élisabeth-Charlotte d'Orléans) is signed 'P. Darmancour', Perrault's son; the printed book nowhere names Charles Perrault
- Two states of the 1697 original are distinguished: copies with the errata leaf ('fautes à corriger') and copies without the errata leaf in which those errors stand corrected in the text; sources describe these as the first and second states but do not uniformly settle the sequence, so state should be recorded descriptively rather than asserted
- A separate second Barbin edition followed within 1697 with the errata silently corrected, and a third Barbin edition appeared in 1707 with the same text and plates under a revised title
- Only a handful of copies of the 1697 original survive; the BnF copy (Rés p Y2 263) is catalogued in mediocre condition
- Publisher imprint reads Claude Barbin, Paris

| | |
|---|---|
| Author | Charles Perrault |
| Publisher | Claude Barbin, Paris |
| Year | 1697 |
| True first | — |
| Format | Hardcover (trade) |
| Key point | Paris: Claude Barbin, 1697; in-12, anonymous, containing the eight prose tales (La Belle au bois dormant, Le Petit chaperon rouge, La Barbe… |
| Book-club edition exists? | No |

## Points of issue
Paris: Claude Barbin, 1697; in-12, anonymous, containing the eight prose tales (La Belle au bois dormant, Le Petit chaperon rouge, La Barbe bleue, Le Maistre chat ou le chat botté, Les Fées, Cendrillon, Riquet à la Houppe, Le Petit Poucet). Look for the engraved frontispiece signed by Antoine Clouzier — three children before a peasant woman spinning, with the placard lettered 'contes de ma mère Loye' — plus a copper-engraved vignette at the head of the dedicatory epistle and at the head of each tale. The dedicatory epistle to Mademoiselle (Élisabeth-Charlotte d'Orléans) is signed 'P. Darmancour', Perrault's son; the printed book nowhere names Charles Perrault. Two states of the 1697 original are distinguished: copies with the errata leaf ('fautes à corriger') and copies without the errata leaf in which those errors stand corrected in the text; sources describe these as the first and second states but do not uniformly settle the sequence, so state should be recorded descriptively rather than asserted. A separate second Barbin edition followed within 1697 with the errata silently corrected, and a third Barbin edition appeared in 1707 with the same text and plates under a revised title. Only a handful of copies of the 1697 original survive; the BnF copy (Rés p Y2 263) is catalogued in mediocre condition.

## Is this the true first?
The Barbin Paris 1697 is the true first and the census claim is correct; the 1695 calligraphic manuscript (five tales) precedes it but is not an edition. An Amsterdam counterfeit from Jacques Desbordes appeared the same year, 1697, with Desbordes reprints following in 1708, 1721 and 1729 — and the 1721 Desbordes resetting reordered the tales, putting 'Le petit chaperon rouge' first where Barbin opened with 'La Belle au bois dormant'. That Desbordes order, not Barbin's, was followed by nearly every later 18th-century edition, so tale order is a usable early check. The first English edition is a separately collected book that belongs beside the French: Robert Samber's translation, 'Histories, or Tales of Past Times. Told by Mother Goose. With Morals. Written in French by M. Perrault, and Englished by G. M. Gent.', London: printed for J. Pote at Sir Isaac Newton's Head near Suffolk-Street, Charing-Cross, and R. Montagu at the corner of Great Queen-Street near Drury-Lane, 1729 (ESTC N1854) — parallel English and French text, engraved frontispiece with 'Mother Goose's Tales' set into the plate, dedication by Samber to the Countess of Granville. Two corrections to the census here: the imprint carries both J. Pote and R. Montagu, not Pote alone; and 'Englished by G. M. Gent' is the 1729 wording, where later 18th-century editions read 'Englished by R. S. Gent'.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club issue exists for a 1697 Paris duodecimo. The reprint traps are the Dutch counterfeits — Desbordes, Amsterdam, dated 1697 and passing as Paris work in the same year as the original — and, on the English side, the long chain of Samber reprints ('the Third Edition, Corrected', 'the Tenth Edition, Corrected', and provincial printings such as B. Collins of Salisbury, 1772, distributed by Carnan and Newbery, of which the Morgan holds a copy, PML 84676) that carry the identical Mother Goose title as the 1729 first. Modern 'first thus' traps include the Nonesuch 1925 'Histories or Tales of Past Times Told by Mother Goose' and print-on-demand facsimiles of the 18th-century sheets, which reproduce period title pages verbatim.

## Source
New Mexico Literacy Project — Is *Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des Moralitez (Perrault's fairy tales / Mother Goose)* by Charles Perrault a first edition? https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/first-edition/histoires-ou-contes-du-temps-pass-avec-des-moralitez-perraul
CC BY 4.0. Part of the Canonical First-Edition Points of Issue dataset (https://newmexicoliteracyproject.org/api/first-edition-titles.json). Last reviewed 2026-07-04.