The Illustrated Treasury Of Children's Literature

by Margaret E. Martignoni (editor)

Time-tested favorites from hundreds of the world's most popular children's books have been selected and assembled in this one-volume library. Contents include: 49 Famous Stories, 20 Fables and Legends. A Complete Picture ABC. 44 Best-loved Fairy Tales. 50 Mother Goose Rhymes. and 79 Favorite Childhood Poems. There are additionally more than 550 colorful illustrations, each a faithful reproduction of the work of a world-famous artist.

Genres: Childrens, Poetry, Fiction, Classics, Fantasy, Young Adult, Anthologies

512 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1955

Reviews

[Pam Orcutt Goossens · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have owned this book since I can remember which is about 58 years. It's copyright is 1955. I have enjoyed many a nap time with my Mother as she read to me aloud and used different voices for the characters in the wonderful stories. I can still recite some of the poems by heart. Two of my favorite are, "The Goops" and "Over in the Meadow." I love this book from my childhood!

[Janice Nelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have owned this book since I was about 6 years old. I still have it now at age 62. I love the illustrations. The poems. The Brownies poems and illustrations. My favorite story was the Little Match Girl. Great memories.

[Fiona Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even after almost sixty five years, this is still one of the best anthologies for children ever published. Unlike many more modern ones, it has things in it that will appeal to slightly older children as well as younger ones. Wonderful illustrations, too. While it may not have as many in full colour as a modern book might, it does have some, and the two tone ones are highly attractive as well. What I particularly like about the illustrations is that they have been taken from the originals by artists such as Arthur Rackham and Jessie Willcox Smith rather than being commissioned especially for the book. I had a copy as a child, but it was read to pieces over the years. A few years back I picked up a copy in excellent condition, and still with it's original slip case on eBay, and had fun reading it all over again.

[Margaret Chind]

https://archive.org/details/illustrat...

Nursery Rhymes - Mother Goose?

Two Happy Little Bears by Thornton W. Burgess, Illustrated by Phobe Erickson
The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter
Pelle's New Suit by Elsa Beskow
The Poppy Seed Cakes by Margery Clark

Poetry

Wyken, Blyken, and Nod by Eugene Feild, Illustrated by Meg Wohlberg
Henny-Penny
The Wolf and the Seven Kids
Johnny-Cake
The Story of the Three Little Pigs
Drakestail
Why the Bear is Stumpy-tailed
Slovenly Peter by Heinrich Hoffman

Aesop's Fables

Old Nursery Rhymes

Over in the Meadow
Nonsense Alphabet by Edward Lear

The Walrus and the Carpenter by Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll poetry
Rachel Field poetry

The Villiage Blacksmith by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Illustrated by Jacob Landau

Christina Rossetti poetry
Victor Hugo poetry
more poetry

My Shadow by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Night Before Christmas by Clement C. Moore

more Aesop's Fables

The Country Mouse and the Town Mouse
Lazy Jack
The Little Match Girl
Red Riding Hood
Hansel and Gretel
The History of Tom Thumb
The Ugly Duckling
The Tinder Box
The Steadfast Tin Soldier
The Elves and the Shoemaker
Rumplestiltskin
The Fir Tree
The Princess and the Pea
The Brave Little Tailor
The Bremen Town Musicians

Excertps
The Story of Peter Pan
Dick Whittington
The Emperor's New Clothes
Cinderella
The Fisherman and His Wife
The Three Aunts
The Half-Chick
The Sleeping Beauty
The Golden Basket by Ludwig Bemelmans
The Angel by Hans Christian Andersen
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
The Story of Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp
Little Lisa
Puss in Boots
The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The Sky Little Horse by Margaret Wise Brown
The Golden Goose
The Adventures of Peter Cottontail by Thornton W. Burgess
The Adventures of Pinocchio by C. Collodi
Copper-toed Boots by Marguerite De Angeli
The Story of Babar by Jean de Brunhoff
New World for Nellie by Rowland Emett
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Uncle Remus: his Songs and His Sayings by Joel Chandler Harris
Rabbit Hill Robert Lawson
How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin by Rudyard Kipling
Augustus Goes South by Le Grand
Peter and the Wolf by Serge Prokofieff, Illustrated by Warren Chappell
The Horse Who Lived Upstairs by Phyllis McGinley
Bambi by Felix Salten
The Good Master by Kate Seredy
Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street by Dr. Seuss /
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
Raggedy Andy Stories by Johnny Gruelle
The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams Bianco
The Lion-Hearted Kitten by Peggy Bacon

Rapunzel
Heidi by Johanna Spyri
Amahl and the Night Visitors by Gian-Carlo Menotti

Ralph Waldo Emerson and other poetry

Paul Revere's Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Aesop's Fables

The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Lassie Come-Home by Eric Knight
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Wyss
Justin Morgan Had a Horse by Marguerite Henry
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle
Penrod by Booth Trakinton
Lad: A Dog by Albert Payson Terhune
Paul Bunyan and His Great Blue Ox by Wallace Wadsworth
Little Women by Louisa M. Alcott
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
The Story of King Arthur and His Knights by Howard Pyle
Pandora, The First Woman by Sally Benson
How Thor Found His Hammer by Hamilton Wright Mabie
Baucis and Philemon

[Ashley Lambert-Maberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Completely fabulous in every way. Begins very simply, and gets more sophisticated as it goes along (e.g. nursery rhymes at the front, excerpt from Dickens at the back!). Beautifully illustrated with the original illustrations. I would begin at the beginning, and read as far as I could before it seemed too challenging, until eventually I found I could read everything, and then I would bounce around among my favourites.

Probably my single most favourite book of my childhood.

Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful.

[Rachel B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading this at night to my baby daughter and it's established reading as part of our bedtime routine. I like tapping into this anthology because I always rediscover books I had completely forgotten about. There are some pieces that would not be considered politically correct today - such as The Tar Baby story from Uncle Remus. Overall, it holds hundreds of tales and excerpts from all kinds of stories.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've had this book as long as I can remember. Read it as a child, usually the shiny pages and the well-known fairy tales. Made it a goal to read it cover to cover to my own children. Finally finished reading it all the way through. Love this book. Such great stories and such great memories. My boys really enjoyed listening to it every night.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wavered between three and four stars. This is in many ways an excellent collection of children's literature. It ranges from nursery rhymes to David Copperfield. Few of the selections do not remain classics of children's literature even 60 years after its publication, and the generous supply of illustrations are almost all of the highest quality, iconic to the works they accompany.

The downside is exactly the fact that this is such a huge collection. While I smiled at many of the excerpts, I enjoyed them precisely because I know the entire works from which they were excised. I often doubted how a choice chapter from a monumental work would really grab a child's imagination. Is the purpose to entice children into reading the whole works? But will a context-less chapter do that?

Moreover, the physical size of the volume is problematic. For most of my childhood, this book was one of those that saw greatest use as a weight to hold down the corners of blanket forts. I do remember my mother reading excerpts from it a few times, but it is too unwieldy to encourage snuggling up for story time. Besides which, the binding has cracked from bearing the sheer weight of itself, and I daresay that most copies will have had the same problem, despite their not being cheaply bound.

Although I am glad I took the opportunity to read this whole massive collection aloud, it will probably go back on the shelf and stay there for the foreseeable future. It might be useful if I am looking for a particular nursery rhyme, fable, or story, but I found myself wondering more than once during my reading what the purpose of such gargantuan anthologies really is. (Other than to sell to people wanting an impressive baby gift for their literarily-minded friends, which I'm pretty sure is how this one ended up in my family!)

[Jaimie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not all collections of children’s stories are created the same, and it seems that somewhere in between the golden age of children’s book illustration and the current age of lusciousness we had a publishing moment of weakness… This book is from the 1950s and claims to provide a range of stories and illustrations in a collected volume to encourage families to come together and read. Maybe the encyclopaedic style of the book appeals to some, but I frankly found it messy and overwhelming. The selection of stories is extensive, I’ll grant them that, but the sheer density, haphazard page design, and often greatly shortened excerpts made even an attempted browse of the volume an impossible undertaking. I mostly bought the collection because it contained a few illustrations from my favourite of the classic illustrators, Arthur Rackham, but even trying to limit my reading to his specifics proved impossible by the inaccurate scope of their index! Instead of indexing him both as a collector (Arthur Rackham’s Fairy Book, which was illustrated by himself and others) and an illustrator, they simply listed him as the former! I did eventually manage to browse through the entire volume to peruse all of his pictorial work, but I may have to go back and re-annotate the book to serve my own research purposes. I’m sure that I have most of the illustrations elsewhere in my collection (and in far better form), so at most this book will serve as a prime example of how not to do book design!

[Matriarchy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book my paternal grandparents gave to my brother and I in 1966. (It's inscribed in my grandfather's handwriting.) My mother read to my brother and I from it, and to our children. THe slipcase is missing, but I thought I would save the book, in case I ever had grandchildren.

[Brooke · Rating 5 out of 5]

My brothers and sisters and I grew up with this book. It has the best stories and poems. My youngest sister was asking about the name of it recently so I thought I should put it on here so I wouldn't forget either. I'd love to own a copy someday.

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

My grandmother bought me this book when I was a baby. My mom read it to me. Her favorite poem was "The Soap."

[James Violand · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must have for all parents. I remember this from my childhood when my mother read to me. Great anthology.

[Dan Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun collection of children's stories and nursery rhymes.
Mostly in the British tradition but incorporating some famous tales from around the world.
The art was widely varied in quality, some good some bad.
A lot of this stuff they used to read to kids was just nonsense repeated over and over.
Some of them are classic moral stories, Aesop's fables for instance.

A great and exhaustive list of the best children's stories. My kids wouldn't let me read every single one, picking and choosing at semi-random.

[Wileyoneone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book-in my library