Another entry in my series of French editions of the Chronicles.
Here are books one and two side-by-side, published in the early 1980s. That is clear because the first is no longer titled Le Lion et la Sorcière Blanche but L’armoire Magique — The Magic Wardrobe. If you do a search on this title and misspell it as L’amour Magique (Magic Love) you will find books about Tantric sex. No kidding.
(More recent French translation have the full and correct title.)
The cover artwork is unique to these editions and looks hastily done. The White Witch has worms, or snakes, or something around her neck. What is it? Vines? Thorns? While on the Prince Caspian cover both Caspian and Trumpkin are riding Aslan, which I don’t think happened in the book, and there’s an inconspicuous badger and a bunch of mice suspended in front of him. Well, both get the main points of the story across, unlike some covers. Both look cheaply and quickly released.
Of more interest here is their publisher. Castor Poche, which means Pocket Beaver in English, is the imprint for children’s and young people’s literature under the Flammarion publishing banner. Castor Poche was created in 1980 and is still one of the leading paperback collections for young people in France.
On to Flammarion, and here’s where it gets interesting. Flammarion is now a subsidiary of Groupe Madrigall, the third largest French publishing group, but it was originally founded in 1875 by Ernest Flammarion, brother the astronomer Camille Flammarion, to publish Camille’s book Treaty of Popular Astronomy. The company also published Émile Zola, Maupassant, Jules Renard, Hector Malot, Colette, and other medical, scientific, geographical, historical works and … the Père Castor children’s series. There’s that beaver again!
Three Père Castor books from the 1950s with distinctive and colorful artwork on the covers.
An early advertisement for the imprint.
After some translation and research I found out Père Castor, or Father Beaver, was a character created by children’s book pioneers Paul Faucher and Lida Durdikova. Like any good father, Père Castor told stories to his children, young beavers Câline, Grignote and Benjamin, stand-ins for curious children who want to learn.
Père Castor and his children from a 1990s animated TV show.
So it looks like there’s where the Pocket Beaver imprint came from. It’s also very fitting for the Narnia books, because Mr and Mrs. Beaver were major characters in the first one.
