Camelot 101

books:

	• Tales of King Arthur Thomas Sir Malory Schocken, 1989 - 28 pages
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Camelot 101

I was looking for a quick-to-read compilation of the key Arthurian tales, and I found it here, so I wasn't as bothered by the previous reviewer by the cutting away of so much of Malory's original text (the cover does warn that the book is abridged). The author struck a compromise between rewriting the original archaic English (the Steinbeck solution, unfinished, alas) and leaving it alone by cleaning it up a bit while including some of the original terms, with translations in the margins ("skift": rid). As the intro mentions, the book isn't a scholarly excursion, it's a retelling of the old great tales.

At first I was going to rate this book a 4 because many of the illustrations are too small to see in any detail. The color plates work well--they are reproductions of medieval images that really give color to the stories around them--but the black-and-whites in the margins are so tiny that even the captions don't help you see what's going on in them. They should have been redone or omitted altogether. And then I opened the book to the very first page, and when I saw a tiny color plate of Arthur's crowning looking so blurred and even misaligned, I thought: this crappy cut and paste just won't do. So I gave it a 3 instead.

I'd like to see the book reissued with better artwork. The reading is easy and enjoyable.

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