By A. A. Milne
The very first Pooh book — where you meet the Bear of Very Little Brain and the whole Hundred Acre Wood — and it's still the gentlest, funniest classic to read a chapter of a night.
A boy named Christopher Robin has a teddy bear called Winnie-the-Pooh, and this is the book that introduces everyone: Piglet, gloomy old Eeyore, Owl, Rabbit, and, partway through, Kanga and Baby Roo, who wander into the forest and stay. Each chapter is its own small, complete adventure. Pooh floats up to a bee tree under a balloon, pretending to be a little black cloud, to get at the honey. He eats so much at Rabbit's house that he sticks fast in the front door and has to wait a whole week to get thin enough to pop out again. He and Piglet track a Woozle round and round a tree and slowly frighten themselves with their own footprints. Eeyore loses his tail, and Pooh goes off to find it. There's a trap dug for a Heffalump, and a birthday for Eeyore that goes charmingly sideways. Nothing bad ever really happens. It's warmth and silliness and friendship from the first page to the last.
This is the keepsake to give when a family wants one book to grow up with, and it's the right place to begin — the original 1926 volume, where Milne first brings Pooh and everyone around him to life, well before the later stories and the growing-up goodbye. Ernest Shepard's line drawings are the definitive Pooh, nothing like the later cartoon, and a good clothbound edition is a genuine heirloom. It reads a chapter at a time, so it carries a child from lap-sitting listener to reading it alone, and there isn't a frightening or unkind page in the whole thing. Given one classic for the nursery shelf, plenty of parents would reach for this one.