Books in Everyman's Library Children's Classics series

A perfect Christmas gift—a beautifully jacketed Everyman's Library Pocket Classics hardcover anthology of two centuries of short fiction about our most majestic companion animal. With full-cloth binding and a silk ribbon marker.Annie Proulx and Bret Harte transport us to the ranches of the Old West and Rudyard Kipling to the polo fields of India. Arthur Conan Doyle makes a famous Thoroughbred disappear, and Raymond Carver gives us a vision of runaway horses in the mist. Jane Smiley, Margaret Atwood, Isaac Babel, and Ted Hughes explore the human passions horses can unleash. From the rollicking racetrack humor of Damon Runyon to the poignant lyricism of John Steinbeck's "The Red Pony" to the wild recklessness of adolescence in William Saroyan's "The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse" and Lydia Peelle's "Sweethearts of the Rodeo," these stories testify to our varied and timeless fascination with the noble animal.

Charles Dickens’s story of selfless Little Nell and her ailing grandfather and their persecution by the magnificently malignant villain Quilp has seized the imaginations and wrung the hearts of generations of readers. Dickens’s talent was superabundant in every way: in his dramatic force and his massive productivity, in his almost surreal comic power, in his compassion and thirst for justice, and in the imaginative pressure he brought to bear on even the most incidental of his characters. The delightfully various figures in The Old Curiosity Shop range memorably from jaunty Dick Swiveller and his little half-starved Marchioness to the hard-hearted siblings Sampson and Sally Brass, jovial Mrs. Jarley, devoted Kit Nubbles, the hunchbacked Daniel Quilp, and, of course, tragic Little Nell herself. Dickens’s depiction of the fate of his main characters is famously harrowing and unfailingly suspenseful, but not the least of its charms is that it is embellished with a supporting cast of figures as grotesque and colorful as anything in the Old Curiosity Shop itself. This edition reprints the original Everyman’s preface by G. K. Chesterton and features seventy-five illustrations by Cattermole and Phiz.

The only available hardcover edition of the fantastical story of the semi-mythical folk hero Baron Munchausen, who has delighted generations of readers all over the world. With a full-cloth, quality hardcover binding, a silk ribbon marker, and gorgeous illustrations by Gustave Dore.Baron Munchausen was a real German adventurer known for his fondness for tall tales and exaggeration. But the exploits that Rudolf Erich Raspe attributed to him in his book, which he first published in London in 1785, quite clearly drew on folklore and on Raspe's own whimsical inventiveness. The Baron's escapades include a balloon expedition to visit the King of the Moon, an encounter with the goddess Venus, a battle with the Turkish army, and an enormous sea creature who swallows him up in the South Seas.

Since its first publication in 1908, generations of adults and children have cherished Kenneth Grahame’s classic, The Wind in the Willows. In this entrancing, lyrical world of gurgling rivers and whispering reeds live four of the wisest, wittiest, noblest, and most lovable creatures in all literature—Rat, Mole, Badger, and Toad of Toad Hall. Like true adventurers, they glory in life’s simplest pleasures and natural wonders. But it is Toad, cocky and irrepressible in his goggles and overcoat, whose passion for motorcars represents the free and fearless spirit in all of us; just as it’s Toad’s downfall that inspires the others to test Grahame’s most precious theme—the miracle of loyalty and friendship.

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)The first great manifesto of women’s rights, published in 1792 and an immediate best seller, made its author the toast of radical circles and the target of reactionary ones. Writing just after the French and American revolutions, Mary Wollstonecraft firmly established the demand for women’s emancipation in the context of the ever-widening urge for human rights and individual freedom that surrounded those two great upheavals. She thereby opened the richest, most productive vein in feminist thought, and her success can be judged by the fact that her once radical polemic, through the efforts of the innumerable writers and activities she influenced, has become the accepted wisdom of the modern era. Challenging the prevailing culture that trained women to be nothing more than docile, decorative wives and mothers, Wollstonecraft was an ardent advocate of equal education and the full development of women’s rational capacities. Having supported herself independently as a governess and teacher before finding success as a writer, and having conducted unconventional relationships with men, Wollstonecraft faced severe criticism both for her life choices and for her ideas. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she dared to ask a question whose urgency is undiminished in our time: how can women be both female and free?

The first and most successful in the Baroness’s series of books that feature Percy Blakeney, who leads a double life as an English fop and a swashbuckling rescuer of aristocrats, The Scarlet Pimpernel was the blueprint for what became known as the masked-avenger genre. As Anne Perry writes in her Introduction, the novel “has almost reached its first centenary, and it is as vivid and appealing as ever because the plotting is perfect. It is a classic example of how to construct, pace, and conclude a plot. . . . To rise on the crest of laughter without capsizing, to survive being written, rewritten, and reinterpreted by each generation, is the mark of a plot that is timeless and universal, even though it happens to be set in England and France of 1792.”

The story of the Spanish knight whose devotion to tales of chivalry leads him and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, into a series of bizarre adventures blends fantasy, comedy, and drama in a way that has gripped the world's imagination for centuries. This edition has been abridged and adapted for children, and enhanced by the delightful illustrations of Walter Crane.

Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, and Snow White are among the jewels we owe to the German brothers Grimm, who began in the first decade of the 19th century to seek out and listen to village storytellers. The best-loved of the tales they discovered are now brought together with the marvelous pictures that in 1900 first established the reputation of one of the greatest children's illustrators of all time, Arthur Rackham.