The 158 Greatest Children's Books

THIS IS A LIST OF BOOKS WRITTEN FOR CHILDREN, and that is the test rather than books children happen to read. It runs from a Sanskrit fable collection composed to instruct princes to a novel published in 2012, and the ordering is chronological by the year each book was first published in its original language — not the year it reached English, and not the year it became famous.

One entry is one book. A series is entered at its first volume unless a single volume is independently famous in its own right, which is why there is one Narnia, one Moomins, one Tintin and one Harry Potter here rather than forty. Picture books are eligible and the illustrator is named. Fairy and folk tale collections are eligible as published books — Perrault 1697, Grimm 1812, Andersen 1835 — while loose oral tales are not, because a tale that was never a book cannot be dated, credited or read.

YOUNG ADULT NOVELS ARE NOT HERE. The upper bound is about fourteen. That is a shelf boundary rather than a judgement, and it is the reason a few books people expect are missing. Two books written for adults are here anyway — Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels — because children took them over so completely within a generation of publication that a list of children's books without them would be describing a different history.

The forty per cent rule

NO MORE THAN FORTY PER CENT OF THIS LIST IS ENGLISH-LANGUAGE IN ORIGIN, and that rule was set before a single title was gathered. It matters because of what happens without it. Four lists were generated independently for this section; the two that were not held to the rule came back seventy-six per cent English, and when the four were merged, the titles all four agreed on were sixty-seven per cent English. Consensus about children's books, left to itself, produces a British and American shelf and calls it the world.

This list is thirty-nine per cent English across twenty-eight languages. The where it comes from filter above exists so that a reader can check that rather than take it on trust. Britain and North America are separate options on purpose: lumping them together as "English" would hide the fact that they are two traditions that borrowed from each other, and would make the largest group on the wall a language rather than a place.

The pictures are part of the work

For a third of these books the illustrator is a co-author, and the section treats them that way. Tenniel is not an illustrator of Alice; he is a co-author of what everyone means by Alice. Shepard is what Pooh looks like in every language the book has been translated into. The Snowman and The Arrival have no words at all.

So every entry records who drew it, and the pictures filter separates the books fused to one set of images from the ones re-illustrated by every generation. The fairy tales have been redrawn by Cruikshank, by Ludwig Emil Grimm, by Rackham, by Disney, and none of them owns the tales. Sendak drew his own, and nobody has tried since.

How the book stands now

This is the question the section asks and most lists do not. A children's book is the one kind of book that has to be handed on to stay alive: it survives only as long as adults keep giving it to children, and the moment they stop it becomes a book about childhood rather than a book for children.

Every entry is marked living, classic, revised, contested or historical. Revised is a statement about the text now in the shops, not a verdict on anyone: several of the most famous books here are currently sold in texts their authors did not write, and a reader is entitled to know that before buying a copy. Contested names an argument without joining it — the entry says who objects and on what grounds, and the field stays contested whether or not this site agrees.

Where the list came from

Four independent lists were generated against one shared brief, merged into a pool of 481 distinct titles, and cut to 158. Only 43 titles appeared on all four lists and 327 appeared on just one, which is worth knowing about any list of this kind, including this one: there is no settled canon of children's books, and anybody who presents one as settled is choosing.

NOTHING HERE IS RANKED. The numbers are positions in a chronology, not places in a league. There is no quality, importance or difficulty score, and there will not be one.