By Margery Williams
Margery Williams's nursery classic: a toy rabbit who becomes Real because a boy loves him down to the threads.
A boy gets a plush rabbit one Christmas, and at first the rabbit is nothing special. The shinier wind-up toys in the nursery think they're better. But the boy takes the rabbit everywhere. He sleeps with him, drags him through the garden, wears the velvet right off him. An old toy horse tells the rabbit a secret: if a child loves you long enough, you stop being a toy and turn Real. Then the boy comes down with scarlet fever, and once he's well the doctor says everything he touched has to be burned to kill the germs, the rabbit included. The rabbit is set out by the trash to wait for the fire, and that's not where the story ends.
I'd hand this over when I wanted a child to have one truly beautiful book to keep. William Nicholson's soft 1922 paintings are the reason to hold the real thing instead of a screen. And the story takes something small and private, the fierce love a child pours into a grubby, half-flat stuffed animal, and treats it as the biggest thing going. A child who has a Rabbit or a Bear of their own may see themselves in it. It reads aloud beautifully, and it holds up for the grown-up doing the reading.