By Don Freeman
A department-store teddy bear missing one button goes looking for it after closing time — and finds a home instead.
Corduroy is a green-overalls teddy bear who's waited a long time on a store shelf for someone to take him home. A little girl named Lisa loves him on sight, but her mother points out he's missing a button and they walk away. So that night, after the store closes, Corduroy climbs down and goes hunting for his lost button — up a giant escalator he thinks is a mountain, across a furniture floor he thinks is a palace, until a night watchman carries him back to his shelf. The next morning Lisa comes back with her own saved-up money, takes him home, sews on a new button, and tells him he's just right the way he is.
For a two- or three-year-old this is the perfect small ache-and-comfort story: a bear who's a little imperfect, a little overlooked, gets chosen and loved anyway. The nighttime search has just enough gentle suspense to hold a young child without ever frightening them, and it resolves into one of the warmest endings in picture books. It tells a child, without fanfare, the thing they most need to hear, that you don't have to be perfect to be wanted.