YOU REMEMBER THE illustrations. Willowy young girls with long elegant hands, their brows knotted with genteel suffering. Girls who are broad of forehead and long of tress, dressed in complicated, Raphaelite dresses. Slim and dark-eyed heroines, with their clavicles lovingly, consumptively shaded and their fingers as expressive as Balinese dancers. And those expressions! Spaniel-eyed with their alas-and-alacks, their pale and beautiful woe-is-me anxiety. Self-martyring. Put upon. Wearing the weight of the world on their trembling anorexic shoulders.

The content of fairytales themselves might be remembered in the abstract ether of folklore, but when people tell you about their recollections of childhood stories, the physical book itself still seems to figure very prominently. It’s the actual pages they remember, the heaviness of the collection as they brought it down from the shelf at bedtime, the first glimpse of the big volume under the Christmas tree. I worked for a while in a second-hand bookshop and people would often come in chasing some book with an inquiry like ‘I’m looking for a book I used to have as a child. It was about this big and sort of aqua-blue, with a fairy on the cover…or maybe it was a princess – anyway, it was a hardback…do you have it?’ I actually heard my boss once say, straight-faced, ‘Well, all our aqua-blue hardbacks are over there, arranged by size and colour, so feel free to have a browse…’