# 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 original-language edition; the census claim is confirmed.

**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 | American edition |
| 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 original-language edition; the census claim is confirmed. Several of the tales had appeared earlier in periodical form in Moetjens's Recueil at The Hague (1696-97) — a pre-publication appearance, not a book edition — and a 1695 manuscript of Contes de ma mère l'Oye with five tales survives at the Morgan Library, which predates print but is a manuscript, not an edition. The first English edition is separately collected: Robert Samber's translation, 'Histories, or Tales of past Times... with Morals. By M. Perrault', London: J. Pote, 1729 — this is the edition that introduced 'Mother Goose Tales' to English and later American readers. Dutch/Amsterdam piracies circulated almost immediately (the Desbordes press issued French editions in 1697, 1700, 1708, 1714 and 1721; the 1721 Desbordes resequenced the tales and that order carried into subsequent English translations), and illustrated Dutch counterfeits are documented — an 'Amsterdam 1697' imprint is not the Paris first.

## Telling it from reprints & book-club editions
No book-club issue exists for a 1697 imprint. The live trap is 'first thus': the celebrated illustrated editions — Doré (Paris: Hetzel, 1861), Rackham, and Harry Clarke (1922) — are frequently offered as 'first editions' of Perrault when they are firsts only of their own illustrated issue. Any 18th-century Amsterdam or The Hague French imprint is a piracy/counterfeit, not the Barbin original.

## 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.