Your child says Arrr more than they say hello, draws treasure maps on the back of the cereal box, and would move onto a pirate ship tomorrow if you'd let them. This is a shelf for exactly that: a laugh-out-loud pirate picture book to start, a wild rhyming romp, a first chapter-book adventure, the gross true history, a couple of fat reference-and-treasure-box books to pore over, and the original pirate novel waiting at the far end. Any single one satisfies the whole thing. Pick by your child's age and appetite.
Every book here is for the same pirate-obsessed child, but they come at that obsession from wildly different angles, and that's the whole point of a shelf. There's a warm, funny picture book where a real crew recruits a boy from the beach, a bouncy underpants romp for the littlest fan, a bonkers Neil Gaiman rhyme, a first chapter book with just enough danger, a gross-out nonfiction that tells the horrible truth as a joke, a serious photo reference, an interactive treasure-box of a journal, and finally Treasure Island, the book that invented every pirate cliche your child already loves. You reach for the one that fits the child in front of you tonight. What runs across the shelf is the gap between the pirate of dress-up and the pirate of history, and each child gets to travel as far along it as they're ready for.