The most popular of all ghost stories was first published on 17 December 1843, and by Christmas Eve 6, 000 copies had been sold at a published price of five shillings. The story of Scrooge, a miser who becomes a different man when he is presented with visions of past, present and future by Marley's ghost, was an immediate success and has remainded so ever since. It is a book to read on Christmas Eve beside a blazing fire -and the best introduction to Dickens for young readers not quite ready for his longer novels. Arthur Rackham, master of the fantastic,
illustrated the story in 1915.

The grandniece of Mark Twain is now remembered only for the last two books she wrote, DADDY-LONG-LEGS (1912) and its sequal DEAR ENEMY (1915). Both remain endearing stories that, as the critic Naomi Lewis says "make rewarding reading". Told in the form of letters, this modern version of the Cinderalla tale is an irresistible love-story of an orphan and her unknown benefactor.

The story of the Spanish knight Don Quizote whose devotion to the tales of chivalry leads him into a series of bizarre adventures in the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, blends fantasy, comedy and gripping narrative in a way that has appealed to children ever since it was first published. All the wisdom and humour of Cervantes' great seventeenth-century classic are to be found in Parry's very readable modern abridgement, enhanced by the delightful illustrations of Walter Crane, one of the greatest of all English children's book illustrators.

Aesop is believed to have lived in the sixth century B.C., a slave on the Greek island of Samos. His ability to teach lessons in morality through story has made his name synonymous with the genre of 'fable'. In the witty and entertaining tales attributed to him sly foxes, wicked wolves, industrious ants, and others, provide a commentary on human behaviour while the storyteller recommends the virtues of common sense and worldly wisdom. The Fables had already been popular for centuries before Roger L'Estrange published a new English translation in 1692, with the declared intention of making a comprehensive selection addressed to children.

Seventeenth-century Frenchman Jean de La Fontaine happily plundered Aesop and other classical writers as a source for his witty, elegant fables, as well as inventing a number of his own. Seeking to expose the weaknesses of human nature, he offered vivid perspectives on greed and flattery, envy and avarice, love and friendship, old age and death. The sixty fables collected here - from 'The Crow and the Fox' and 'The Cock and the Pearl' to 'The Grasshopper and the Ant' and 'The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse' - are illustrated with more than a hundred drawings by R. de La Neziere which which charmingly capture La Fontaine's unforgettable cast of animal personalities.

Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales originally appeared in batches each Christmas in the mid-19th century, and Spink's English translation was first published in 1960. This edition has Heath Robinson's illustrations, dating from 1899.

When Heidi, a five-year-old orphan, is dumped on her reclusive grandfather who lives on a remote mountainside above a Swiss village, he is none too pleased by her arrival. But Heidi quickly wins him over with her cheerful disposition and kindness, and thoroughly enjoys her new life, spending the summer days roaming the Alpine pastures with young Peter the goatherd. Three years later, this rural idyll is cruelly interrupted when her aunt fetches Heidi away to the city as a hired companion for Clara, a rich girl who is disabled. Clara adores her new friend, but the family's strict housekeeper tries to repress Heidi's high spirits and she becomes ill, pining for her mountain home. The resolution of Heidi's dilemma transforms the lives of everyone around
her and has entranced readers for generations with its vision of the joys of country life and the power of love and friendship.

Kipling began these stories in Vermont, to amuse his daughter when they were living in his wife's home town. The comic explanations, such as how the camel got his hump and how the whale got his throat, are complemented by the author's illustrations, with their extensive and ridiculous captions.

Every child's bookshelf should start with a collection of nursery rhymesso that these fantastic and nonsensical verses (some so old their meaning is long forgotten) are among the first magical words to sound in a child's ear. This collection of over two hundred rhymes was assembled in 1903 with the family in mind ('Tradition in the nursery has acted as a severe editor'). and each page is illustrated each verse decorated, with the imcomparable drawing of Charles Robinson.

Barrie's classic tale of the boy who wouldn't grow up. It started life as a series of stories made up for the five Llewelyn Davies boys, who were virtually adopted by Barrie after being orphaned. This edition has F.D. Bedford's illustrations, which first appeared in the author's own day.

Everyone knows Pinocchio, the walking, talking wooden puppet carved from a table leg. Pinocchio, an endearing scamp, is always getting himself into trouble. But it isn't the sort of trouble most kids get into. Skiving off school, he is kidnapped by a puppeteer, robbed by a Cat and Fox, and persuaded to visit an earthly paradise where naughty children have perpetual fun - and turn into donkeys. Sold to a circus, then to a man who tries to drown him for his donkey-skin, he miraculously turns back into a puppet and goes in search of his 'father' (whom he must rescue from the belly of a giant dogfish ...). Throughout these manic adventures he is haunted by the ghost of a Talking Cricket he has crushed to death for giving good advice, and watched over by his personal guardian fairy. All the while, Pinocchio dreams of becoming a real boy. Told with wit and humour, his story is also a moral fable about making the right choices, and what it is to be a loving human being.

Defoe's most celebrated story of Crusoe's shipwreck, his resource fulnessand ingenuity in his soliatry life on a desert island and his rescue of Man Friday has been abridged and retold many times since its publication (in two volumes) in 1719. It even appeared recently in graphic-novel form. In 1968 Kathleen Lines determined to make the original text more accessible to young readers by breaking Defoe's original, continuous narrative into chapters, slightly cutting Crusoe's long meditations, and compressing the relevant bits of THE FARTHER ADVENTURES into a neat Epilogue, so that readers learn what happened to Friday.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was both a doctor and a believer in spirits. which may partly explain why his Sherlock Holmes is one of literatures most beloved detectives: Holmes always approaches his cases with the gentility and logic of a scientist. but the stories are suffused with an aura of the supernatural. Narrated by devoted assistant Dr. John H. Watson. Holmess adventures were so addictive that fans protested the master deducers death in 1893 and Doyle had to resurrect him.

For lovers of the thrilling and chilling, young and old, Poe's sensational stories cannot fail to hit the spot. This collection contains the best of his prose works, including of course the well-known masterpieces 'The Fall of the House of Usher' (the ultimate haunted house story), 'The Pit and the Pendulum', 'The Tell-Tale Heart' and 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' (the very first detective story in fiction). First published in 1935 it has been redesigned, re-typeset and republished in a handsome edition which features all Rackham's original colour and black and white illustrations.

The story of Robin Hood, said Roger Lancelyn Green can never die, nor cease to fire the imagination. Like the old fairy tales it must be told and told again, for it is touched with enchantment. Placing his hero's legendary history in the reign of Richard I of England. Roger Lancelyn Green has used as his sources the ballads, romances and plays, as well as the literary retellings of Noyes, Tennyson, Peacock and Scott. In this literary mosiac he has brought to life a character who is the archetypal outlaw and popular champion of the poor. Walter Crane, one of the masters of children's book illustration, created the drawing for a retelling of the Robin Hood story by Henry Gilbert. published in 1912.

Among the best loved of all classics for children are the tales of Mowgli, the boy who learned the law of the jungle as he grew up among a pack of wolves in India's Seeonee Hills. First published in 1894, the book imagines a child living and flourishing in a community of animals - an idea that perhaps had its origin in Kipling's unhappy childhood. Kurt Wiese's illustrations, commissoned by the American firm of Doubleday in 1932, have never appeared in Britain before. An artist with a particular interest in animals and an amazing visual memory, he remembered all he had observed on his travels in the Far East during the early 1900s, first as a salesman in China and then as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese.

Although E. Nesbit regarded her poetry as her most important work, it is her children's books (written 'to keep the house going') that ensured her lasting fame and which are still enjoyed with such affection today. Her readers have their oen favourites, but the film version of THE RAILWAY CHILDREN, with Jenny Agutter as Roberta, the eldest daughter of the man unjustly sent to prison, and the Bernard Cribbins as the friendly railway porter, brought the book to a new generation of readers who love it for Roberta's courage and the satisfaction of the ending when her father is vindicated and restored to his family.

This story of two spoilt and lonely children, whose happiness is regained as they bring to life a neglected garden, has become the best-loved of all Mrs. Burnett's books, but it did not acquire universal popularity until long after its first publication in 1911 Although set in Yorkshire, it was inspired by the rose garden at Great Maytham Hall in Kent (which still flourishes) where its much-travelled author lived from 1898 to 1907. The story has many illustrators, bur none has surpassed Charles Robinson who first created in his pictures the romantic and mysterious atmosphere of Misselthwaite Manor and the locked, forgotten garden.

When Kay gets a splinter of the wicked troll's magic mirror in his heart it becomes hard and cold - just like a lump of ice. Kay is abducted and bewitched by the chillingly beautiful Snow Queen and his loyal sister, Gerda is prepared to face anything to find her brother and bring him home. So, she undertakes the nightmarish journey to the Snow Queen's icy labyrinth. . .

Baron Munchausen’s absurd adventures have entertained adults and children alike for more than two centuries. First published in England in 1785, his traveller’s tales soon became as well known as those of his near contemporaries, Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe – but are a great deal funnier! The real Baron Münchhausen was a German aristocrat whose colourful military career and sporting experiences provided ample material for the after-dinner stories for which he became notorious. One of the guests at the Baron’s table was Rudolf Erich Raspe, librarian, scientist and writer, who later, hard-up in London, turned the Baron’s astonishing life-story to good account. Raspe’s fictional Baron adopts the same tone of nonchalant exaggeration apparently characteristic of the original as he tells how he turned a wolf inside out in Russia, rode on a Turkish cannon ball, danced a hornpipe in the stomach of large fish which had swallowed him alive, mended his horse which had been severed in two by a portcullis, lent his friend General Elliot a hand at the siege of Gibraltar by nipping into the enemy camp and destroying all their cannon, and even visited the moon – twice. The more preposterous the subject, the more earnest and deadpan the narrator’s manner.

Stevenson's great adventure story, set in the 18th century, was conceived in the Scottish Highlands, where the author and his 12-year-old stepson amused themselves by making a map that showed the location of buried treasure on an island. The illustrations first appeared in 1949.