Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Louisa May Alcott

Everyman's Children's Classics has more than 50 titles in print. It offers the finest editions currently available of the world's greatest children's books in handsome, full cloth hardcover bindings. 
 
The library brings back into print major illustrators such as Ivan Bilibin, Kate Greenaway, Arthur Rackham, Nicolas Bentley, Walter Crane, Aubrey Beardsley, Edward Ardizzone, W.Heath Robinson and Mervyn Peake.

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.

Little Men

Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys

Johann Wyss

This classic story of a Swiss family - pastor, wife and four sons -shipwreaked on an uninhabited island (most fortunately blessed with an unlikely profusion of natural resources) was written by a Swiss army chaplain for the entertainment of his own four sons. The family adventures in survival; also provided a useful starting point for lessons in natural history. First published in Zurich in 1812-13, the story was translated into French and English shortly afterwards and has appeared in many versions ever since. When, in 1909, the American artist Louis John Rhead was invited to illustrate the Robinson's adventures, he based his numerous drawings on 'sketches made in the tropics. '

The Swiss Family Robinson

L. M. Montgomery

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.

Anne Of Green Gables

Hans Christian Andersen

When Kay gets a splinter of the wicked troll's magic mirror in his heart it becomes hard and cold - just like a lump of ice. Kay is abducted and bewitched by the chillingly beautiful Snow Queen and his loyal sister, Gerda is prepared to face anything to find her brother and bring him home. So, she undertakes the nightmarish journey to the Snow Queen's icy labyrinth. . . .

The Snow Queen

Richard Doyle

The story of Jack, the intrepid little boy whose courage and ingenuity defeated a host of many-headed giants several times his size, is an English folk-tale that must have been told often in the Victorian nursery of the Doyle family. Growing up in the 1830s, they were all gifted children, especially Richard, whose natural talent for draughtsmanship was matched by imaginative invention and a passion for legend and the grotesque. In 1842, when only eighteen, he created for his own delight a picture-book version of Jack The Giant Killer, writing the text by hand, and carefully placing on each page a water-colour illustration within a pictorial border. The new everyman edition has typeset the text for greater legibility and redesigned the book for contemporary appeal, while retaining Doyle's vivid and characterful illustrations, enlarged and enhanced by modern colour printing techniques. The result is a book that will satisfy the modern child's appetite for bloodthirsty exploits of wonder and magic, yet is at the same time a true collector's item for anyone interested in the history of children's book illustration.

Jack The Giant Killer

Robert Browning

First published in 1842, Robert Browning's poetic version of the legend about the lost children of Hamelin is sub-titled 'A Child's Story' and was originally intended only for the private enjoyment of Willie Macready, young son of the famous actor. Once in print, it became a perennial favourite with generations of children (and compilers of poetry anthologies for children!) Kate Greenaway's illustrations, engraved by her regular printer Edmund Evans, were first published in 1888 and have become as popular as the poem itself, being considered by John Ruskin to be her finest work.

The Pied Piper Of Hamelin

W Heath Robinson

From the Eastern folk tales that make up the vast collection known as THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS certain stories - of Aladdin, Sindbad and Ali Baba - have become everlasting favourites with children and a magical ingredient of Christmas pantomine. First introduced to Europe in the early eighteenth century by the French orientalist, Antione Galland, who translated and bowdlerized the stories to suit contemporary taste, this edition presents the fourteen best-known tales selected from an English text of 1821. The illustrations are reproduced from a larger collection in 1899. William Heath Robinson then at the start of his career, was commissioned with four others and his drawings (much the best) reveal a gentle, romantic charm that has been forgotten in the success of his later, purely comic work.

Aladdin

and Other Tales From The Arabian Nights

George MacDonald

First published in 1870-1 as a serial in GOOD WORKS FOR THE YOUNG, a magazine of Christian outlook, George MacDonald's fantasy is reguarded by his admirers as his finest novel. The story of the virtuous Princess Irene and the wicked goblins with heads as hard as stone has a strong moral overtone but is enjoyed by readers of all ages. The author said: 'I do not write for children, but for the child-like, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five'. Arthur Hughes, a follower of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, was a close friend of the author and provided the perfect illustrative accompaniment to his work.

The Princess And The Goblin

Jean de La Fontaine

R. de la Nézière

Seventeenth-century Frenchman Jean de La Fontaine happily plundered Aesop and other classical writers as a source for his witty, elegant fables, as well as inventing a number of his own. Seeking to expose the weaknesses of human nature, he offered vivid perspectives on greed and flattery, envy and avarice, love and friendship, old age and death. The sixty fables collected here – from 'The Crow and the Fox' and 'The Cock and the Pearl' to 'The Grasshopper and the Ant' and 'The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse' – are illustrated with more than a hundred drawings by R. de La Nezière which which charmingly capture La Fontaine’s unforgettable cast of animal personalities.

Fables

Miguel De Cervantes

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.

Don Quixote Of The Mancha

Frances Hodgson Burnett

This story of two spoilt and lonely children, whose happiness is regained as they bring to life a neglected garden, has become the best-loved of all Mrs. Burnett's books, but it did not acquire universal popularity until long after its first publication in 1911 Although set in Yorkshire, it was inspired by the rose garden at Great Maytham Hall in Kent (which still flourishes) where its much-travelled author lived from 1898 to 1907. The story has many illustrators, bur none has surpassed Charles Robinson who first created in his pictures the romantic and mysterious atmosphere of Misselthwaite Manor and the locked, forgotten garden.

The Secret Garden

Alexandre Dumas

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.

The Three Musketeers

Hilaire Belloc

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.

Cautionary Verses

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.

Little Lord Fauntleroy

Aesop

Stephen Gooden

Aesop is believed to have lived in the sixth century B.C., a slave on the Greek island of Samos. His ability to teach lessons in morality through story has made his name synonymous with the genre of 'fable'. In the witty and entertaining tales attributed to him sly foxes, wicked wolves, industrious ants, and others, provide a commentary on human behaviour while the storyteller recommends the virtues of common sense and worldly wisdom. The Fables had already been popular for centuries before Roger L'Estrange published a new English translation in 1692, with the declared intention of making a comprehensive selection addressed to children. Everyman reprints his text, together with Stephen Gooden's superb engravings which were first published in 1936 in a limited edition.

Carlo Collodi

Everyone knows Pinocchio, the walking, talking wooden puppet carved from a table leg. Pinocchio, an endearing scamp, is always getting himself into trouble. But it isn't the sort of trouble most kids get into. Skiving off school, he is kidnapped by a puppeteer, robbed by a Cat and Fox, and persuaded to visit an earthly paradise where naughty children have perpetual fun - and turn into donkeys. Sold to a circus, then to a man who tries to drown him for his donkey-skin, he miraculously turns back into a puppet and goes in search of his 'father' (whom he must rescue from the belly of a giant dogfish ...). 
 
Throughout these manic adventures he is haunted by the ghost of a Talking Cricket he has crushed to death for giving good advice, and watched over by his personal guardian fairy. All the while, Pinocchio dreams of becoming a real boy. Told with wit and humour, his story is also a moral fable about making the right choices, and what it is to be a loving human being. 
 
Pinocchio is an astonishing work of fantasy which has been toned down and sentimentalized over the years, not least by the Walt Disney film. Everyman returns to a beautifully illustrated early translation of 1916 which captures the vivid inventiveness of Collodi's original.

Pinocchio

Daniel Defoe

Defoe's most celebrated story of Crusoe's shipwreck, his resourcefulness and ingenuity in his soliatry life on a desert island and his rescue of Man Friday has been abridged and retold many times since its publication (in two volumes) in 1719. It even appeared recently in graphic-novel form. In 1968 Kathleen Lines determined to make the original text more accessible to young readers by breaking Defoe's original, continuous narrative into chapters, slightly cutting Crusoe's long meditations, and compressing the relevant bits of THE FARTHER ADVENTURES into a neat Epilogue, so that readers learn what happened to Friday. The evocative engravings are reproduced from a mid-nineteenth-century edition published by Cassell, Petter &amp; Gilpin.

Robinson Crusoe

His Life and Strange Surprising Adventures

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