I am looking for a book from my childhood and I’m hoping you can help me. It is a children’s book of short stories/folktales/fables, all of which were set in Africa. Each story was different and had different characters. It was written in English, but all of the characters had African names. I think there were around 20 different stories.
It was a large, hardcover book, maybe 15-18 inches tall by 8-10 inches wide. The cover definitely had orange on it. I think it also had brown and dark green. I also am pretty sure that there were vertical stripes on the cover. I think the book had around 80-100 pages, but that number could be way off.
My mom read it to me in the mid to late 1990s, and it was probably purchased from a Scholastic book fair, Barnes and Noble, or Borders.
I thought of ‘Magical Tales from Many Lands’ by Margaret Mayo, illustrated by Jane Ray (1993). Only some of the stories are African, but it’s a large hardcover book that is mostly orange, so maybe?
Peggy Appiah published several collections of African folk tales for children in the 1960s and 70s: e.g. ‘Tales of an Ashanti Father; ‘The Pineapple Child’; ‘Why There Are So Many Roads’; etc. Could it be one of these?