Most Popular Books by Brian Alderson

One of the most famous children''s books reviewer chooses 100 classics from 400 years.

When did someone decide that books might be written and published for child readers? Originating from an exhibition held at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, this bibliographical study focuses on the child as the audience for books in the English language. The authors show how certain creative talents, driven by a sense of purpose, or a wish to make some money, attempted to appeal directly to children, and how the publishing industry came to realise that this audience might constitute a profitable market. As well as plotting the chronological development of children''s book publishing, the authors also show how publishers adapted their strategies to exploit this new market. Sweetness and light did not prevail everywhere, but even in some of the most forbidding examples presented here there was a commercial optimism that both merriment and wisdom might be happily combined, within the pages of children''s literature.

To commemorate the centenary of the death of the artist and illustrator Randolph Caldecott, Brian Alderson, noted historian of children''s literature and children''s book editor of The Times, has prepared for the British Library an exhibition designed to pay tribute to Caldecott''s skills as a creator of picture books, which will run from October 1986. This book, incorporating a catalogue of the exhibition, with its many illustrations in colour and black and white, both demonstrates Caldecott''s genius and provides a brief critical history of an important area of children''s book publishing. Comedy, storytelling and graphic exuberance are all part of the great tradition of book illustration that runs from Hogarth and Rowlandson down to the present day, and Caldecott''s special genius was to have embodied these qualities in the subjects he chose. Together with an appraisal of those who influenced Caldecott and the effect he had on later generations of illustrators, Brian Alderson explains the relationship between pictures and text, techniques (wood-cuts, wood-engraving, intaglio printing), the effect of industrialisation on the picture book and the subsequent development of book illustration.

Accompanying volumes are facsimiles of three of the earliest extant English nursery rhyme books.