After a six-year break, his son Laurent adopted the amiable elephant and continued his adventures, closely following de Brunhoff’s celebrated illustrative style. Delightfully amusing illustrations make this short collection of classic Babar tales a book to treasure for children young and old. citation needed] Ariel Dorfman's The Empire's Old Clothes [22] is another critical view, in which he concludes: "In imagining the independence of the land of the elephants, Jean de Brunhoff anticipates, more than a decade before history forced Europe to put it into practice, the theory of neocolonialism". The series has over 100 licensees worldwide, and the "Babar" brand has a multi-generational following.

We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed.Included are the first three stories by Jean de Brunhoff, the creator of Babar: The Story of Babar, The Travels of Babar, and Babar the King. De Brunhoff’s style is an illustrator’s version of Matisse, Dufy, and Derain, which by the nineteen-thirties had already been filtered and defanged and made part of the system of French design.

Many people did not notice the 10 year gap, as Laurent also showed exceptional talent in drawing elephants. The BABAR books set the tempo for all picture books that followed: their "large format, fine litho-printing and hand-written text" fueled the "visual triumph" (Whalley and Chester, 189) of the picture book in the 1930s. This third book in the series follows the founding of Celesteville, named after Babar's wife, a city that would become the setting for many subsequent adventures of the elephant king and his friends. Additionally, the city is portrayed as being European while the elephant homeland is in Africa, so there is a colonialist theme running throughout the book.

Aside from endorsing Colonialism, Jean de Brunhoff makes light of death by killing off Babar's mother on page two, quickly moving on and completely ignoring it. All of this could maybe be overlooked if The Story of Babar had a positive message, but the only take-away seems to be that elephants (read Africans) are uncivilized and would do better with city-life (read European Colonialism). And I feel fine saying this - anyone that can find "faults" like what is listed here needs to lighten up. The bloodthirsty biographies of the world’s most infamous pirates are reproduced in this Folio edition of Captain Charles Johnson’s renowned work, including original woodcut illustrations and a fascinating introduction by Margarette Lincoln.