Of all the fairy stories of Italian literature this is the best known and the best loved. The name of the marionette is familiar in every household of northern and central Italy. In its whimsical extravagance, its quaint humor and its narrative style, the story appeals to both old and young.
"Pinocchio — The Adventures of a Marionette" is a wonderfully fanciful romance, the hero of which is Pinocchio, a wooden puppet carved from a billet of wood by a poor artisan Geppetto. How this little wooden manikin became suddenly endowed with life and animation and led his inventor a hard life for many years is told.
Pinocchio had a head of wood and no heart worth mentioning, and his pranks, his follies and his willfulness got him into unimaginable scrapes before he learned wisdom and discretion. Curiously enough, the adventures of the Puppet are so much like the adventures of any headstrong and foolish boy that an obvious lesson lies on the surface of this highly imaginative tale.
The many original drawings by Charles Copeland are as unique as the story.
