The arrival of Christmas means that the children's shelves in our bookshops will be filled with all manner of seasonal "novelties", many of them garish in the extreme and many of them more a tribute to marketing ingenuity than literary or artistic excellence. But go beneath the dross and there are still to be found books which, in addition to providing the pleasures of a satisfying read, are so attractively produced that even holding and handling them affords a sensuous and aesthetic experience. The appeal of such books is guaranteed to last well beyond the festivities.
Four titles in a new series from Walker Books (£7.99 each in UK) easily fall into this category. Aptly entitled "Treasures", the series offers small-format (180mm x 108mm) hardback versions of classic children's stories, exquisitely illustrated in full colour by some of today's leading picture book artists. The attention to detail, in the form of paper quality, jacket design, layout and typography, is stunning, resulting in elegant - and highly collectable - examples of the book-designer's craft.
Of the texts themselves, the best-known is Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, from his first collection of Jungle Book stories. Here, in Danuta Mayer's Indianminiature style artwork, the exotic world of the Raj is brought vividly to our eyes as we follow the young mongoose's exciting quest for survival in his encounters with ferocious cobras, Nag and Nagaina.
Whereas the Kipling is nature red in tooth and claw, Sarah Orne Jewett's 19th-century tale of New England, A White Heron, offers a gentle, pastoral terrain, in which the peace and beauty of the natural world are celebrated and preserved by Sylvia, its young, sensitive heroine. The lyricism of the prose is imaginatively captured in the freshness of Wendy Anderson Halperin's rural land scapes.
The rural landscapes provided by illustrator Patrick Benson for Walter de la Mare's The Lord Fish are very much those of the English countryside. But it is a countryside touched, as always in de la Mare, by the magical and the mysterious: few other writers are as skilled in evoking a sense of other-worldliness. This tale of "transmogrification", with its under current of discontent and yearning, fully merits its return to print. a la Grimm, given extremely stylish illustration by Laura Stoddart: see, for example, the page devoted to the wonderful array of kitchen utensils shown to the boy hero Jacob by the old woman into whose clutches he falls. The fairy world in Eleanor Farjeon's Elsie Piddock Skips in Her Sleep is, on the whole, a brighter place than it is in de la Mare or Hauff. This is a joyous little story, engagingly structured, which has at its heart the cheerful vivacity of childhood at its most carefree. It is perfect for reading aloud, not least to little girls (and boys) whose excitement about Christmas morning threatens to keep them awake.
Robert Dunbar is a teacher and critic