It was an auspicious day at the Princeton Public Library. Not only did April 2 mark the 207th birthday of the beloved creator of classic fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875); it was children’s librarian Lucia Acosta’s birthday as well. To celebrate the occasion, Ms. Acosta led a special Story Time program for youngsters in the third-floor Story Room located just off the the library’s children’s section.

“There are lots of different versions with different pictures,” explained Ms. Acosta to the dozen or so youngsters who arrived with parents, grandparents, and caretakers. While the Danish author’s fairy tales — The Little Mermaid, The Emperor’s New Clothes, and The Tinderbox, to name just a few — have been translated into many languages (not to mention receiving the Disney treatment) — Ms. Acosta reassured her audience that “it’s still the same story.”

These same stories, albeit in more rarified formats, are also housed at Princeton University’s Firestone Library, where a collection of more than 1,000 Danish editions, early translations, and important reprints of Hans Christian Andersen’s works was placed on deposit in 1995 by Lloyd E. Cotsen and later gifted to the library. In 2005, the Cotsen Children’s Library, in Firestone Library, observed the bicentenary of Andersen’s birthday with several months’ worth of events that included an exhibition, an academic conference, excerpts from a children’s opera, storytelling, and screenings of various film adaptations of Andersen’s tales.

At last week’s public library program, Ms. Acosta read from simplified versions of The Ugly Duckling, and The Princess and the Pea. The ten ducks in the first story provided a natural lead-in for having everyone count their own ten fingers, and the five ducks in the second version provided a great opportunity to break into song (“Five little ducks went out one day/Over the hill and far away/Mother Duck said ‘quack quack quack, quack/But only four little ducks came back …”).

Later, the discrepancy between the number of mattresses on the cover of a library copy version of The Princess and the Pea (13), and the number used in an inside illustration (20), may have provided a lesson about life’s inconsistencies. “They didn’t count, did they?” observed Ms. Acosta.

After thanking each other with their “hands and feet” and getting “stamped,” the children were invited to visit a display of just a few recent versions of Mr. Andersen’s stories.