For when you want to give one book that's really a whole shelf's worth — a fat treasury or anthology that holds a childhood between two covers. Instead of a thin single that gets read twice, these last months of bedtimes: hundreds of nursery rhymes, five hundred poems, forty-four complete picture-book classics, all seven Curious George stories. Any one of them is a generous gift on its own, so you're not building a set — you just pick the one that fits the child's age. Every book here is graded honestly, so you know before you wrap it whether there's anything tender inside.
Browse this giving shelf by the age of the child you're buying for and pick one. It runs roughly youngest to oldest so you can find your spot. My Very First Mother Goose is the first-ever library for a baby or toddler; Richard Scarry's Best Storybook Ever is the busy, look-and-find treasury a three- or four-year-old pores over alone; The Complete Adventures of Curious George and The 20th-Century Children's Book Treasury are the story-a-night collections that carry a family through months of bedtimes; and The Random House Book of Poetry and Jerry Pinkney's Aesop's Fables are the dip-in collections a five-to-ten-year-old grows up inside. Every one of them holds far more than a single book would, which is exactly what makes any one of them a generous gift.