Calleja Fantastic Tales

How the books were found

A family trunk, a letter from Peru, and a private rescue.

This series began not in a library catalogue, but in a family trunk. While helping my mother, now in her later years, sort through old papers and keepsakes, I found a fragile group of Calleja booklets that her late father in Peru had once given her. Some still carried handwritten library notes and the traces of earlier readers.

The little books were part of a correspondence that crossed an ocean. After my mother immigrated to America, her father wrote to her often from Peru, and these stories traveled with those letters as pieces of home and childhood: small enough to be tucked away, vivid enough to survive in memory.

By the time we opened the trunk, the booklets were too brittle and damaged for easy reading. My mother wanted to read them again. What began as a private repair for her became this larger restoration: preserving the Spanish originals, repairing the artwork, and translating the stories for readers who had never had a way into them in English.