Robin put his head down on his arm and shut his eyes - cover / frontispiece
This is the book written by Anna Alice Chaplin (1880-1920), a musician and a writer. Her work in literature consisted mainly of short stories and The now-a-days fairy book is her best-known piece. It's still available through the web but the description is unfortunately pretty wrong. It's not a collection of popular all-time classics but rather a frame story of kids hanging out with a granny who is telling them different fairy tales and short stories, challenging them to revive some of the excerpts.
When, for instance, the story about the Three Bears is told, kids take their teddy bears and go for the picnic in the meadow. In The Beauty and the Beast, a monkey toy is presented as the beast that is a relatively original approach because other illustrators mostly opted for more scary creatures (see, for instance, Walter Crane).
But this is just that kind of book - gentle, playful, and nice. The illustrations by Jessie Willcox Smith are just perfect for it. Just like Anna Alice Chapman choose positive scenery without any significant conflict, building on simple wordplays (Robin Hood - Robin put ...) and similar innocent techniques using the frame of classic fairy tales and poems just for one of the layers of the background, Willcox Smith added another element in the mosaic of nostalgic view on the childhood not necessary as it is but as it should be.
We already pointed out it's not a collection of classic fairy tales as you'll find in superficial mostly copy-pasted descriptions of the popular web pages. It's fair to say a few words about the illustrations as well. There should be six full-page full-color illustrations altogether but all available digitized versions offer just three of them. It's also not clear if the illustration titled The Sleeping Beauty (originally published in Collier's one year before The now-a-days fairy book belongs to this collection or not, as one of the collectors claims, so we, just in case, present it at the end). The cover illustration, titled Robin put his head down on his arm and shut his eyes should be used as a frontispiece (the first illustration in the book, just before the text starts), not as the outside cover, what raises even more questions only people from Dodd, Mead, and company from New York who published it in 1911, could answer.
Fortunately, a few private collectors sent us scans of their versions (we may suppose there are several different editions and there is also a possibility the missing pages in the digitized versions were simply torn out - each one of them was inserted manually, torn on the yellow paper), so we can present all of them. There they are:
She lufs me she lufs me not (page 16)
The Three Bears
Beauty and the Beast
Little Red Riding Hood
A modern Cinderella
The Sleeping Beauty
Here is also a complete list of used stories and poems which served as starting points for eighteen chapters:
1. The Fairy Ring 2. Fairy Talk 3. The Story of the Four Elfin Princes 4. The Three Bears 5. The Toys’ Holiday 6. The Shadow Room 7. “Snow-White and the Magic Mirror” 8. “Beauty and the Beast” 9. ”The Old Woman Who Sweeps the Cobwebs from
the Sky” 10. The Mist Island 11. The Seven Playing Princesses 12. “The Sleeping Beauty” 13. Roma’s Story 14. “Little Red Riding Hood” 15. The House Goblins 16. The Witch Night 17. A Gypsy Princess 18. “Good-Bye” Envoy