By Beatrix Potter
All twenty-three of the little tales in one fat volume, Potter's own paintings and all, so you never have to hunt for the one about the rabbit again.
Peter Rabbit squeezes under the gate into Mr McGregor's garden, eats too much, loses his jacket and both shoes, and is nearly caught. Then there are twenty-two more. Jemima Puddle-Duck accepts hospitality from an elegant gentleman with red whiskers who is very keen to help her build a nest, and cannot work out why. Tom Kitten is rolled in dough by rats in the attic. Squirrel Nutkin is so rude to an owl that he loses his tail over it. Mrs Tiggy-Winkle does the washing. Each tale is a few hundred words, each page has one of Potter's watercolors facing it, and they were made small on purpose, because she wanted them to fit in a child's hands.
Potter never once wrote down to anybody, and that's the entire trick. The sentences are short but the words are not: soporific, affronted, implored, exasperated. She expected a small child to swallow a hard word whole in a sentence they otherwise understood, which is how children actually learn words. So the tales work at three and they work at nine, for different reasons. The little ones get an animal in a coat doing something naughty. The older ones start to notice that these gentle-looking books are almost entirely about being eaten, and that Potter thinks that's funny.