Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book: Brian Froud and Terry Jones squeeze Victorian belief, hoax and hilarity into an offbeat Christmas gift I just wasn’t expecting.
Some Christmas presents feel as though they’ve fallen through time, trailing glitter and a faint smell of mischief. Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book is one of them. I love receiving books, all manner of books during the holidays in many way they are the very best gifts, a tradition started for the young with Thesauruses and dictionaries, and complete works of Beatrix Potter, Winnie The Pooh, followed on with adventures in Narnia, Nancy Drew, Ellery Queen, Emil and The Detectives and more recently Harry Potter. I secured the whole series in my twenties and devoured them.
Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book for all its whimsy did take me back to my younger days, where and when my love of books began and yet it is not a children’s book.
First published in the mid-1990s, it is a cult object that masquerades as a prim Victorian flower‑pressing album—only the “specimens” aren’t geraniums but fairies, inconveniently squashed between the pages. The conceit is deliciously simple and sustained with such care that it becomes a small work of satirical theatre: a facsimile diary belonging to Lady Angelica Cottington, annotated in looping script and splattered (quite literally) with the remains of the Little People.
The pedigree behind the prank explains its longevity. Brian Froud, the English fantasy artist who helped conjure Jim Henson’s Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal and co‑authored the era‑defining Faeries with Alan Lee, provides the images: naughty, luminous, leaf‑skinned sprites who look like they’ve crawled out of moss and moonlight. The text is by Monty Python’s Terry Jones, whose particular blend of scholarly curiosity and impish humour turns the book into a send‑up of late‑Victorian propriety. Together, they create a faux artefact that looks and reads like something you might find in a slightly haunted country house.
A joke with history behind it.
The pun in “Cottington” is no accident. The book gleefully nods to the Cottingley fairies, the famous 1917 photographs of two Yorkshire girls posing with paper cut‑outs that convinced swathes of the public including famously Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, that fairies were real. Those images, printed in The Strand Magazine and later disowned by their creators, are the apotheosis of a much broader Victorian and Edwardian appetite for marvels: spirit photography, seances, and cabinets of curiosity that blurred science with showmanship. Jones mines that cultural seam, parodying the era’s earnestness and credulity while never sneering at the human longing to believe.
Where the Cottingley episode asked us to look closely at photographs, Lady Cottington’s asks us to “feel” the pages: fake stains, imprints, and splodges become comic evidence. The book becomes a little museum of folly—a fictional hoax mounted so convincingly that it doubles as a satire of belief itself.
The art of being squashed.
Froud’s fairies have always been a touch unruly, all twiggy elbows and sly glances; here they’re caught in the act of being caught. Wings smear into iridescent blots; grins become Rorschach curls; bodies are rendered in watercolour so tactile you’d swear the paper is bruised. The joke is naughty, often literally so: these are impish, bare sprites with a bawdy streak, endlessly tormenting their human chronicler. That push‑and‑pull—between prim diary and indecorous subject—powers the book’s comedy.
Jones’s voice completes the illusion. The opening preface assures the reader, no fairies were harmed in the production of the work.
Presented as the private jottings of a well‑bred young lady who persists in “pressing” what she insists she cannot see, the captions and marginalia spiral from naïveté to wilful repression and back again. It’s Pythonic in its deadpan, but there’s also the historian’s ear for period tics and polite euphemism. The result reads like a Victorian hoax that has hoaxed itself.
Why it made a cracking Christmas present for me.
It’s tactile and beautiful: a high‑quality art object and a conversation piece for the coffee table.
It bridges fandoms: fantasy art aficionados, Monty Python devotees, folklore nerds, and lovers of Victoriana will all find a way in.
It’s genuinely funny: the gag holds up on a second, third, and tenth flip‑through.
It pairs well with other books too: gift givers could team it with Froud and Lee’s Faeries or an art book from Labyrinth for a themed bundle.
A few practical notes before you wrap it
Content: there’s whimsical nudity and cheeky innuendo; it’s not a children’s picture book. Think older teens and big kids upwards to grand and great grandparents who still love a cheeky giggle.
Editions: the book has been reissued over the years; later printings often reproduce the design flourishes nicely. There are also spin‑offs that expand the Cottington lore.
Availability: widely found new and second‑hand; a good‑condition copy with intact design features makes the best gift.
More than a novelty, Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book is a sly little essay on seeing and believing, dressed up as a Victorian keepsake. It skewers the era’s hoaxes while revelling in their theatre, and it does so with images you’ll want to linger over and lines that land like perfect asides. For the right recipient—someone who loves a beautiful book with a wicked wink—it’s the sort of present that gets opened before lunch and passed round the room until the pudding arrives.
It was probably the most looked at book in our home on the 25th this year and sparked a good deal of conversation and quick, clever and interesting debate that would have otherwise never happened.
A tribute to my good friend who chose this weird and quite wonderful gift for me this year.