The Complete Illustrated Stories of Hans Christian Anderson

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Hard to read, even for adults - Rated
I was swayed by the cover, "fully illustrated" claim and the price as well as the amount of content into buying this book, but it's really quite disappointing, although the back cover describes it as "handsome" and "a pleasure to own". It's 948, A5 pages long but should probably be twice as long - the reason being that the type is so incredibly small, akin to old typewrite style that you need to have A1 eyesight to get to grips with it. There are no colour pictures, which although a shame you could cope with perhaps, and fully illustrated you couldn't say either, the pictures being facsimilied line drawings or "original engravings", hard to make out, and old in style, every few pages. This makes sense when I discovered it is actually an 1889 reprint so perhaps more useful to historians! or collectors than general readers. Adults will find it hard going and kids will have no sustained interest. The only positive is that it is a large resource for Anderson's stories - 137 featured here but then that is somewhat irrelevant if it's not appealing to read. I like old style things but this is too extreme - would be better to buy a shorter collection or his individual stories.