Everyman's Library CHILDREN'S CLASSICS

The story of the Spanish knight Don Quizote whose devotion to the tales of chivalry leads him into a series of bizarre adventures in the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, blends fantasy, comedy and gripping narrative in a way that has appealed to children ever since it was first published. All the wisdom and humour of Cervantes' great seventeenth-century classic are to be found in Parry's very readable modern abridgement, enhanced by the delightful illustrations of Walter Crane, one of the greatest of all English children's book illustrators.

The exotically named Baroness Orczy was the daughter of a Hungarian aristocrat who came to London at the age of fifteen. first published in 1905, her historical novel The Scarlet Pimpernel became almost as famous as the French Revolution itself. It tells of the escapades of Sir Percy Blakeney, whose mission is to help the innocent victims of the Reign of Terror escape the guillotine. Assuming ever more daring and ingenious disguises he suceeds in both outwitting his opponents and in keeping his activities a secret from his English friends. Everyman's Library Children's Classics publishes the novel in a new and up-to-date edition to tie in with the BBC production to be screened this Christmas.

Dumas' most popular novel, The Three Musketeers, has long been a favourite with children, and its heroes are well-known from many a film and TV adaption. Set in France in the seventeenth century, it follows the fortunes of D'Artagnan, a poor Gascon gentleman, who arrives in Paris to join the Kings Musketeers and is befriended by three of them, Athos, Portos and Aramis, with whom he embarks upon a career of adventure and romance. Dumas is a brilliant story-teller: inexhaustively inventive, a master of dialogue and with a fine sense of drama and of historical period, he seizes the readers attention on the first page and holds it to the last. Everyman's Library Children's Classics reprints the first, and the best, English translation, by William Barrow.

These classic tales of Awful Warnings about the consequences of Bad Behaviour are among the best of comic verse ever written for children. 'Designed for the Admonition of children between the ages of eight and fourteen years', they were first published in 1907; though such eccentricity as Henry King's chewing string may no longer be a common misdemeanour, the humour is perennial and continues to entertained generations of children and their parents. This edition includes New Cautionary Tales, first published in 1930, and illustrated by Nicholas Bentley, who replaced as collaborator the poet's friend Lord Basil Blackwood (B. T. B. ) after his death in World War I.

‘Am dining at Goldini’s Restaurant, Gloucester Road, Kensington. Please come at once and join me there. Bring with you a jemmy, a dark lantern, a chisel, and a revolver – S. H.’

The game's afoot for the most famous amateur detective of all time in this collection of eight of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic tales.

‘The Speckled Band’, a Victorian melodrama in a country house, comes complete with murderous villain, murdered heroine, and a very unpleasant snake; ‘Silver Blaze’ tells of a missing race horse on Dartmoor which turns out not to be missing at all, and a murder that never was. In ‘The Redheaded League’ a pawnbroker answers an advertisement for a red-headed man and bizarrely finds himself copying out the Encyclopedia Britannica; in ‘The Bruce Partington Plans’ Holmes is skulking in the London Underground with a dead body when his patriotic services are called upon to find some stolen state secrets in the run-up to World War I.

Sidney Paget was the original illustrator and helped to form the image of Sherlock Holmes which exists to this day - in fact, it was he who created the famous deer-stalker!

This collection of eight French contes collected by Charles Perrault in the last decade of the seventeenth century, contains perhaps the most famous fairy stories of all time - 'Cinderella', 'The Sleeping Beauty', 'Puss in Boots', 'Blue Beard' and of couse the eponymous 'Little Red Riding Hood'. It quickly became the standard version of stories on these themes, was translated into innumerable languages and then re-entered the oral tradition of most European countries, particularly England. The Everyman edition contains the classic Heath Robinson illustrations from 1921.

'The very essence of all illustration for children's books' said The Times on Christmas Eve, 1878, shortly after the publication of Caldecott's first two picture books, or Toy Books as they were called, John Gilpin and The House that Jack Built. They were an immediate success, and in Caldecott's special talent for juxtaposing words and pictures, he created a tradition of children's picture-book making that continues to the present day and has influenced many artists, in particular, Maurice Sendak. Between 1878 and 1886 Cldecott produced sixteen picture books, taking as texts traditional rhymes and songs, and illustrating them in sepia colour with great humour and feeling for the English countryside which so often provides the background. The collection reproduces eight of his books, including The Babes in the Wood, Oliver Goldsmith's Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog, The Great Panjandrum Himself, The Queen of Hearts, Ride a Cock-Horse to Banbury Cross, and Sing a Song Of Sixpence.

The famous stage-designer Ivan Bilibin was a self-taught artist who was lucky enough to be offered the commission of a lifetime at the very start of his career. In 1899 the Department for the Production of State Documents asked this young Russian artist to illustrate a series of fairy tales, a task that took him four years to complete and inspired his finest work, reflecting his deep love for his country and his passionate interest in its national dress and wooden architecture. This, with ten other traditional tales, make up the collection for which all Bilibin's original artwork has been faithfully reproduced. Gillian Avery has provided a retelling of the texts which admirably complements Bilibin's distinctive illustration, itself rooted in the stylized forms of Russian folk and medieval art.

The appeal of this Canadian classic children's book is seemingly everlasting - for it is a story of an individual making good by her own efforts, an orphaned girl sent to live with an elderly brother and sister who really want a boy to help on the farm. First published in 1908, the book was written by a scoolteacher who'd experienced the same upbringing as her heroine and who set her story in the place she knew best - Prince Edward Island. The story was popular from the start, and Mark Twain described Anne as 'the dearest, and most lovable child in fiction since the ommortal Alice'. The book has been filmed, staged, tramslated in many languages, and has been introduced by a highly successful TV dramatization. Sybil Tawse, English portrait painter and illustrator of many classics, including Mrs Gaskell's CRANFORD and Lamb's ESSAYS OF ELIA, provided the pen-and-ink drawings in 1933.

The five original fairy tales included in this volume were first published by Davis Nutt in 1888. Although it is said that Wilde wrote them for his two young sons, the author himself claimed they were '. . . . not for children, but for childlike people from eighteen to eighty'. Since then the stories have been constantly reprinted and, despite the author's disclaimer, children have made the tales their own, a particular favourite being 'The Selfish Giant' - the highly moral story of the giant who banished children from his garden, so that spring never came. Charles Robinson, who produced the illustrations for a special edition first published in 1913, brought to the book a feeliong for its innate sadness that exactly fits the poetry of Wilde's text.

Originally published as a serial in the children's monthly magazine ST NICHOLAS, LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY was Frances Hodgson Burnett's first children's novel and on its publication in book form in October 1866 it became at once an astonishing success. Reprinted before publication (even though its first printing was 10, 000 copies), the book went on the bestseller lists alongside Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE and Rider Haggards's KING SOLOMON'S MINES. Marghanita Laski described the novel as 'the best vesion on the Cinderella story in modern idiom that exists', and this tale of an arrogant English aristocrat reformed by his grandson, brought up in the classless society of New York, has retained its popularity over the years. Charles Brock, the PUNCH artist who epitomized the stereotype of the reserved, shy Englishman, illustrated the book with eight watercolours and forty-five pen-and-ink sketches for an edition first published by Warne in 1925.

Just two years after the extraordinarily successful publication of LITTLE WOMEN and GOOD WIVES, Louisa Alcott's brother-in-law died, leaving two sons. She immediately decided to write a sequel to provide for her sister and nephews, and LITTLE MEN, published in 1871, became a tribute to her father's theories of education. The story is set in Plumfield, a school run by Jo and her German husband, Professor Bhaer, and they follow the precepts of Grandpa March in cultivating the little mind - 'not tasking it with long hard lessons, parrot-learned, but helping it to unfold as naturally and beautifully as sun and dew help roses bloom'. The different ways in which the children, good and bad, respond to this kind of nurturing make up the episodes of the novel which instantly proved as popular as its predecessors, selling 42, 000 in the first year after its publication.

The story of Robin Hood, said Roger Lancelyn Green can never die, nor cease to fire the imagination. Like the old fairy tales it must be told and told again, for it is touched with enchantment. Placing his hero's legendary history in the reign of Richard I of England. Roger Lancelyn Green has used as his sources the ballads, romances and plays, as well as the literary retellings of Noyes, Tennyson, Peacock and Scott. In this literary mosiac he has brought to life a character who is the archetypal outlaw and popular champion of the poor. Walter Crane, one of the masters of children's book illustration, created the drawing for a retelling of the Robin Hood story by Henry Gilbert. published in 1912.

The most popular of all ghost stories was first published on 17 December 1843, and by Christmas Eve 6, 000 copies had been sold at a published price of five shillings. The story of Scrooge, a miser who becomes a different man when he is presented with visions of past, present and future by Marley's ghost, was an immediate success and has remainded so ever since. It is a book to read on Christmas Eve beside a blazing fire - and the best introduction to Dickens for young readers not quite ready for his longer novels. Arthur Rackham, master of the fantastic, illustrated the story in 1915.

Gillian Avery, historian of children's books and novelist whose first book THE WARDEN'S NEICE has become a modern classic of children's literature, has made a very personal selection of favourite poems. If children like them as much as she does, then (she says) they will stay in the mind long after their readers have grown out of childhood. Her taste is for the Augustan rather than the Romantic writers, but her choice of over two hundred and fifty pieces ranges widely, from ballads to Ted Hughes, from Ben Jonson to Noel Coward. The illustrations are taken from the books of natural history made by Thomas Bewick, the celebrated English wood engraver.