The Coming of the Fairies

This is a surprise pick. It’s the first book about “real” fairies that I read. I was 15 years old when my local librarian showed me the book. The author was best known for creating the Sherlock Holmes series, and he wrote a book about fairies? 

The Cottingley fairies appear in a series of photographs taken by two young girls living in England in 1917. When the pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of the existence of fairies. Many people accepted the images as genuine; others believed… show more.

This is Doyle’s version of Elsie and Francis’s story, a book in which he argued that the existence of fairies had been proven, at last, by the modern technology of photography. To me, it’s a fascinating look at how events told from one point of view (a powerful man’s) can be entirely different from the same events told from less powerful players in the same drama. It’s also surprisingly timely, given the current state of polarization in our country: a case study of how people often believe what they want to believe, no matter how crazy it seems to others.