This two-volume set titled "Tales Of Old Japan" was written by A. B. Mitford and published in London by Macmillan in 1871 and is a rare first edition set. It is a collection of Japanese fairy tales and legends compiled by Mitford when he was secretary to the British legation in Japan between 1866 and 1870. The illustrations are taken from original woodblocks by Odake, an artist in the employ of the author. The stories include The Forty-Seven Ronin, The Accomplished and Lucky Tea-kettle, The Foxes' Wedding, and The Story of the Faithful Cat, among others, and the author helpfully included the recipe for a cosmetic for blackening the teeth. The books are bound in full red morocco, with five raised bands, six gilt-ruled compartments with gilt lettering and gilt decorations, the red morocco covers with double gilt-fillet borders, marbled endpapers, the half-title followed by the Macmillan monogram, a woodcut frontispiece, the title page, which reads "Tales of Old Japan, by A.B. Mitford, Second Secretary to the British Legation In Japan. In Two Volumes, With Illustrations Drawn And Cut on Wood By Various Japanese artists, London: Macmillan And Co. 1871." Both volumes were printed in London by C. Clay Sons and Taylor, on Bread Street Hill, and all the edges are marbled. Volume I has a three-page Preface, where he spoke about Odake and was told the lines of the wood cuts go with the grain, in the manner of Albrecht Durer, then two pages of Contents, a two-page list of illustrations, with twenty-five woodcuts, including the frontispiece, then an erratum slip is tipped in before the first page of text, and there are 277 pages of text. Volume II has two pages of contents, a one-page list of illustrations, for a total of 31 plates in the two volumes, and 272 pages of text. Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford (1837 - 1916) was a British diplomat and writer who wrote as A. B. Mitford. He was a noted scholar of Japanese culture and traveled extensively in East Asia and Japan during the Meiji-period. His most notable work is Tales of Old Japan, and he was the paternal grandfather of the Mitford sisters, famous authors in their own right. During his time in Japan, he was said to have fathered Clementine Hozier, in the course of an affair with his wife's sister, Blanche, and Clementine married Winston Churchill in 1908. In the 1902 Coronation Honours list it was announced that he would receive a barony, and he became Lord Redesdale, the 1st Baron Redesdale, in 1902, and he was seated in the House of Lords a week later. The books are 8vo. and measure 8 x 5 1/2 in. wide, with tight bindings and clean pages and text for the most part, but some pages and text have brown spots and some endpapers as well, and many of the woodcuts are clean, but not all, and there's offset on some pages facing the woodcuts, too. There's light rubbing on the spines and faded lettering, light rubbing along the edges of the spines and along the edges of the boards, and some wear at the heel and at the tips of both volumes, and still an important set about Japanese culture and literature before the Meiji Restoration, literature that had been hitherto unknown in Western society. WorldCat lists only two sets found in Special Collections around the country (at Princeton and Claremont College in California), so the books are indeed rare. #63 #1541