For when you want to give a child a real book to keep — one of the great old stories in a gorgeous, illustrated hardcover that lands on a shelf and stays there for twenty years. You pick by the child in front of you: their age, and which story is theirs. A four-year-old and their worn-soft rabbit want a different book than a ten-year-old itching for pirates, and both are here.
This is a shelf of keepsakes, not a course to work through. The whole idea is a beautifully illustrated hardcover of a story worth owning for life, so pick by the child rather than reading in order. The Velveteen Rabbit is the one for the very young, a first great book about a most-loved toy. Wind in the Willows is the coziest, all riverbank and ridiculous Toad. The Secret Garden is the slow, healing one about a garden and two prickly children coming back to life. The Jungle Book and Peter Pan bring adventure with a wilder, darker edge, and Treasure Island — the roughest and oldest-skewing — is the great pirate story where men actually die. Alice is the pure nonsense in the middle. A word said plainly: some of these are old, and old books carry old assumptions. Several hold dated language and period attitudes a parent should know before giving, and each book's page names exactly what and where.