By A.A. Milne
Both Pooh story books and both of Milne's poetry books in one volume, the whole of the Hundred Acre Wood plus the verse, with Shepard's original pictures.
This one book holds all four of Milne's classics together: Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner, the two story books, plus When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six, the two books of poems. Pooh floats up to a beehive under a balloon, gets stuck fast in Rabbit's front door after too much honey, hunts an imaginary Heffalump, and finds Eeyore's lost tail. Between the stories are the verses a child half-knows already, Christopher Robin saying his prayers, the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, the small boy who will not come down. Every one of Ernest Shepard's original line drawings is here.
Every chapter is a complete little adventure and every poem is whole on its own, so this fat, handsome book is really a year of five-minute bedtimes, a story or a verse tonight and a fresh one tomorrow with nothing to remember in between. Milne's language is gentle and a touch old-fashioned in the loveliest way, wonderful said aloud, and the characters are the originals a child already half-knows from the films. Because it carries a child from lap-sitting listener to reading the chapters alone, and holds the poems they will still know decades later, it is the kind of book a family keeps for good.