Stevenson's gift as an author and poet for children lay partly in his lack of condescension towards them, and he preserved a large element of the child in his own personality. He wrote many of these poems whilst ill in bed, and the illustrations were first published shortly after his death.

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 American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne was a friend of the poet Longfellow and had much earlier suggested they collaborate on a story for children based on the legend of Pandora's Box, but this never materialized.

From the Eastern folk tales that make up the vast collection known as THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS certain stories - of Aladdin, Sindbad and Ali Baba - have become everlasting favourites with children and a magical ingredient of Christmas pantomine.

Lewis Carroll's Alice has been enchanting children for over 150 years. Head strong Alice, the impatient White Rabbit, the fearsome Queen of Hearts and the hilarious Mad Hatter are among the best loved literary creations. This beautiful collectable illustrated edition has the original illustrations and is cloth bound.

The appeal of this Canadian classic children's book is seemingly everlasting - for it is a story of an individual making good by her own efforts, an orphaned girl sent to live with an elderly brother and sister who really want a boy to help on the farm.

With 13 children of his own clamouring for bedtime stories it isn't surprising that author George MacDonald discovered he had a gift for composing fairy tales.

Described on the title-page of the first edition as 'the autobiography of her horse, translated from the original equine', BLACK BEAUTY was Anna Sewell's only book, written when she fatally ill but determined to record her passopnate indignation at the insensitive behaviour of people towards animals.

Edward Lear, the 20th child of a London stockbroker, entered the household of Lord Stanley as little more than a servant, but his sense of humour soon made him welcome above stairs and he began to amuse the children with comic drawings and rhymes. This book was first published in 1846.

Includes classic tales of Awful Warnings about the consequences of Bad Behaviour.

This edition of the famous fairytale was first published in 1919, and includes the pumpkin coach and mice horse, the rat coachman, lizard footmen and the glass slipper. It is a full-length version of the story, and is illustrated with Arthur Rackham's silhouette drawings.

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). 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.

One of the great nineteenth-century folklorists, Joseph Jacobs collected stories from oral sources and made scholarly notes on their origin, but he deliberately recorded them in a plain and direct style which he thought suitable for children and which makes them 'supremely tellable'.

Aesop is believed to have lived in the sixth century B.C., a slave on the Greek island of Samos. 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. 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.

First published in Germany in 1812, these tales were collected by the two brothers Grimm from neighbouring villages and spinning rooms, and include "Hansel and Gretel", "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and "Rumpelstiltskin". Arthur Rackham's illustrations were first published in 1900.

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.

The story of Jack, the intrepid little boy whose courage and ingenuity defeated a host of many-headed giants several times his size, is an English folk-tale that must have been told often in the Victorian nursery of the Doyle family.

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.

First published as a serial in YOUNG FOLKS between May and July 1886 and now reprinted in an Everyman edition on the centenary of Stevenson's death. Rowland Hilder is famous for his paintings of the English countryside but his work in book illustration covered a much wider canvas.

The legends of King Arthur - the most revered hero of British Mythology - have been retold many times, but Roger Lancelyn Green's version has become a classic since its first publication in 1953.

Originally published as a serial in the children's monthly magazine ST NICHOLAS, LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY was Frances Hodgson Burnett's first children's novel and on its publication in book form in October 1866 it became at once an astonishing success.

Just two years after the extraordinarily successful publication of LITTLE WOMEN and GOOD WIVES, Louisa Alcott's brother-in-law died, leaving two sons.

Written during World War II, The Little Prince tells of the friendship between the narrator, an aviator stranded in the Sahara desert, and a mysterious boy whom he encounters there.

This collection of eight French contes collected by Charles Perrault in the last decade of the seventeenth century, contains perhaps the most famous fairy stories of all time - 'Cinderella', 'The Sleeping Beauty', 'Puss in Boots', 'Blue Beard' and of couse the eponymous 'Little Red Riding Hood'.

A story, based on the author's own experience, of an American family - four sisters and their mother, living through the months while the father is away fighting in the Civil War. "Good Wives", takes up the story of "Little Women" three years on.

Every child's bookshelf should start with a collection of nursery rhymes so 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.

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. 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 ...).

'The very essence of all illustration for children's books' said The Times on Christmas Eve, 1878, shortly after the publication of Caldecott's first two picture books, or Toy Books as they were called, John Gilpin and The House that Jack Built.

Defoe's most celebrated story of Crusoe's shipwreck, his resourcefulness and 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.

The famous stage-designer Ivan Bilibin was a self-taught artist who was lucky enough to be offered the commission of a lifetime at the very start of his career.

The exotically named Baroness Orczy was the daughter of a Hungarian aristocrat who came to London at the age of fifteen. Everyman's Library Children's Classics publishes the novel in a new and up-to-date edition to tie in with the BBC production to be screened this Christmas.

H.' The game's afoot for the most famous amateur detective of all time in this collection of eight of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic tales. 'The Speckled Band', a Victorian melodrama in a country house, comes complete with murderous villain, murdered heroine, and a very unpleasant snake;

Features Baron Munchausen's absurd adventures. This book 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, and lent his friend General Elliot a hand at the siege of Gibraltar.

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).

The story of Robin Hood, said Roger Lancelyn Green can never die, nor cease to fire the imagination. 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.

A tale of a girl and a vegetarian giant with an odd manner of speaking, who together save the country from Fleshlumpeater, Bonecruncher, Gizzardgulper and other hideous giants.

Around the year 117 AD, the Ninth Legion, stationed at Eburacum - modern day York - marched north to suppress a rebellion of the Caledonian tribes, and was never heard of again. During the 1860s, a wingless Roman Eagle was discovered during excavations at the village of Silchester in Hampshire, puzzling archaeologists and scholars alike.

Gillian Avery, historian of children's books and novelist whose first book THE WARDEN'S NEICE has become a modern classic of children's literature, has made a very personal selection of favourite poems. The illustrations are taken from the books of natural history made by Thomas Bewick, the celebrated English wood engraver.

Wonderful collection of nonsense verse, from Chesterton to Dahl, Lear to Carroll. With beautitul, original illustrations, both full colour and black & white.

Since then the stories have been constantly reprinted and, despite the author's disclaimer, children have made the tales their own, a particular favourite being 'The Selfish Giant' - the highly moral story of the giant who banished children from his garden, so that spring never came.