Pinocchio

Geppetto, a poor woodcarver, crafts a marionette from a strange piece of talking wood and inadvertently brings the mischievous Pinocchio – a walking, talking, wooden boy - into the world. The naughty, selfish puppet heads off into the world and encounters all manner of unusual and dangerous characters on his adventures, undergoing a series of fiendishly imaginative trials - among them being swallowed by a giant dogfish and turned into a donkey - that will lead him to self-knowledge. Along the way he will be helped by a beautiful fairy, a talking cricket and his loving father as he learns how to become what he most longs to be - a real boy.

One of the most widely read books of all time, Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio is a riotous, tragicomic tale that will charm young and old with its endearing blend of mischief and magic.

This beautiful Macmillan Collector’s Library edition of Pinocchio features the charming illustrations of the classic British illustrator Charles Folkard and an afterword by Anna South.

Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

Carlo Lorenzini was born in Florence, Italy, in 1826 but spent most of his childhood in the town of Collodi - the name of which he would later borrow for his famous pseudonym, Carlo Collodi. A volunteer with the Tuscan army during the Italian Wars of Independence, Collodi was politically active and, from the 1850s onwards, regularly contributed satirical articles to political newspapers. He first began to engage with a young audience of readers when he published a translation of the French Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault in 1876, and then began work on his most celebrated book, The Adventures of Pinocchio, which was published as a complete book in 1883. He died in 1890, in his home city of Florence.