Children's Books - Dragons and other animals

E Nesbit is famous for writing The Railway Children, Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet and many other books for children. She also wrote a series of dragon stories published in one volume in 1972. It has illustrations by Erik Blegvad

Mary Norton wrote the Borrowers books, another well known series of children's books. All The Giants Are Dead was published in 1975. I obviously bought it for the Brian Froud illustrations. Also pictured below is The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris by Leon Garfield. I met Leon Garfield in 1974 and he kindly signed my copy of the book. It is delightful novel - a comedy of errors set during the Victorian period.

The following book Animal Land is a scholarly study of animals in children's literature. I can't remember much else about it, but it covers the incidence of animal characters in children's books from Aesop's Fables to Moominland. As well as having a handsome dust jacket it has a lovely cloth binding too.

Leon Garfield with Edward Blishen collaborated to create a new version of Greek Mythology in these two books The God Beneath The Sea and The Golden Shadow, beautifully illustrated by Charles Keeping. These books were very popular back in the 1970s.

Coming up next - Modern Firsts.