Perle. The Fisherman and His Wife

The Fisherman and His Wife, with Benjy and Bubbles is a children's book by Ruth Lerner Perle and Susan Horowitz with art by Giulio Maestro, published in 1979. It is available at the Internet Archive.

This book is part of the "Benjy and Bubbles" series, where Benjy the "lovable bunny" and Bubbles the "naughty cat" are added to traditional folktales like "The Fisherman and His Wife" (made popular by the Brothers Grimm; Wikipedia). Other titles in the series include: Little Red Riding Hood with Benjy and Bubbles, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Cinderella.

The story is told in two ways: there is a rhyming version with lots of details, along with a very simple version printed on the pages with the illustrations, as you can see here. The simple version of the story uses a vocabulary of fewer than 100 words. I really like this pairing of the story-in-verse with the super-simple version of the story.

Bubbles the Cat is there sitting on the woman's lap, and Benjy the Rabbit is in the boat:

Here you can see Benjy with the fisherman, and he is mentioned in the rhyming version on the left:

You can see them both again here; Benjy and Bubbles don't change the plot of the story, but it is fun to look for them in the pictures:

This story is a "who is more powerful?" type of chain where the fisherman's wife uses the magic fish to become more and more powerful: she goes from a shack to a small house, then a big house; then she wants to be king, then emperor of all the earth, and then lord of the sea and sky. Finally, that is too much for the fish, and he returns everything as it was at the beginning, with the fisherman and his wife living in their small house.

Dan Ashliman has collected other versions of this story: The Fisherman and His Wife and other folktales about dissatisfaction and greed.