A Story, a Story: An African Tale

Many African stories, whether or not they are about Kwaku Ananse the "spider man," are called, "Spider Stories." This book is about how that came to be.
The African storyteller begins: "We do not really mean, we do not really mean that what we are about to say is true. A Story, a story; let it come, let it go."
And it tells that long, long ago there were no stories on earth for children to hear. All stories belonged to Nyame, the Sky God. Ananse, the Spider man, wanted to buy some of these stories, so he spun a web up to the sky and went up to bargain with the Sky God. The price the Sky God asked was Osebo, the leopard of-the-terrible-teeth, Mmboro the hornet who-stings-like-fire, and Mmoatia the fairy whom-men-never-see.
How Ananse paid the price is told in a graceful and clever text, with forceful, lovely woodcut illustrations.

Gail E. Haley is a young but prolific author and illustrator. She has fourteen books to her credit, in addition to illustrating her husband’s syndicated newspaper column, ＂Parents and Children.＂ Miss Haley is the mother of two children -- Marguerite, age tow, and another born shortly after she completed this book.

The idea for this book came to Miss Haley as a result of living in the Caribbean. There she found stories in which tigers and leopards appeared. These, happily, are not part of the Caribbean fauna. And so she traced the origins of these stories back to their sources in Africa. She studied African folklore and culture in preparation for writing and illustrating this book, and to capture the flavor of the languages, the people, their customs and life styles.

The woodcuts that illustrate this book were cut and printed by Miss Haley in her own print shop. She lives and works in New York with her family, surrounded by a large collection of early children’s books, toys and games, cut outs and dolls, going back to the seventeenth century.