Best illustrated books all over the world
Little Tree brings together the quiet poem of E. E. Cummings and Chris Raschka’s unusual pictures. The words move slowly, almost like a soft chant, following a small evergreen from the forest into a family’s home. Raschka paints with sharp shapes — triangles, squares, shifting patches of color. The tree, […]
Charlie and Charlotte and the Golden Canary, published in 1967 by Oxford University Press, is a modern fairy tale about two friends who grew up together on the same street and are suddenly separated when Charlotte’s family moves into a new block of flats. A sad Charlie buys himself a […]
Matthew Cordell’s picture book “Wolf in the Snow” was published in 2017. The story tells of a girl and a wolf cub lost in a snowstorm. The girl helps the wolf cub return to her parents, who in turn bring help to the girl herself. A comparison of Cordell’s fairy […]
The Big Green Book tells the story of a boy who finds a strange book in his uncle’s library. It turns out to be full of magic, letting him play tricks and even outsmart the adults around him. Maurice Sendak’s drawings make the story feel even more playful. They are […]
Once upon a time, there was a special place in Baghdad: the House of Wisdom, or Bayt al-Hikmah, where scholars, translators, and thinkers gathered together during the Islamic Golden Age. They studied medicine, alchemy, physics, mathematics, and more. Ideas traveled across languages and cultures, bringing new knowledge and discoveries to […]
Original title: Чудесная жемчужина Collection of Vietnamese fairy tales
An Edward Lear Alphabet is Vladimir Radunsky’s take on the classic nonsense verse of Edward Lear. In this book Radunsky pairs Lear’s playful, often absurd rhymes with his own bold, witty illustrations. Each letter of the alphabet is accompanied by a short Lear poem, full of odd characters, strange animals, […]
The book follows Mr Chicken, an oversized, curious traveler, as he visits London. Moving through well-known landmarks such as Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, and the London Underground, he explores the city with a mix of enthusiasm and confusion, often misunderstanding what he sees. Hobbs’s illustrations, rendered in his […]
“Good Griselle” is a children’s picture book illustrated by David Christiana, based on the traditional folktale also known as Patient Griselda, which appears in various European literary traditions, including versions by Giovanni Boccaccio and Geoffrey Chaucer. The book retells the story of Griselle, a young woman whose patience and loyalty […]
“Animals of the Bible” is a children’s book written by Helen Dean Fish and illustrated by Dorothy Pulis Lathrop. It was first published in 1937 in the United States. The book presents a selection of passages from the Bible in which animals appear, accompanied by Lathrop’s black-and-white illustrations. Rather than […]
“De geschiedenis van een muis” (The Story of a Mouse) is a work by Wilhelm Busch, originally created in German under the title Die Geschichte einer Maus. It belongs to Busch’s characteristic genre of illustrated stories in verse, where short rhymed texts are closely paired with sequential drawings. The story […]
Once upon a time, a shaggy black Bada lived in a little house by a pond. He lived well, but then zoks appeared — and that was the end of his peaceful life. Bada decided to raise the zoks properly: morning washing, exercise, healthy food. But there turned out to […]
The Little Humpbacked Horse by Pyotr Yershov, a classic 19th-century Russian fairy tale in verse, has always been a challenging text for illustrators. It shifts quickly from humor to fantasy, from everyday scenes to full-scale fairy tale, and not every artist manages to hold all of this together. The 1993 […]
At the end of the 19th century, Randolph Caldecott changed how picture books worked. Instead of treating illustrations as decoration, he made them part of the storytelling itself — adding movement, timing, and humor that the text alone doesn’t carry. This approach became a turning point for children’s books. The […]
A little girl and her loyal stuffed chimpanzee Jubilee spend their days watching birds, climbing trees, and tirelessly exploring the world around them. Patrick McDonnell portrays the childhood of Jane Goodall through these small, everyday moments: reading about Tarzan, hiding in a chicken coop to find out where eggs come […]
The collection of Sámi folktales Seven-Year-Old Archer was published in 1990 by the Murmansk publishing house. The book contains twenty-six traditional stories. Although the illustrations differ slightly in color and style from some of Tsikota’s other works, his unmistakable artistic voice remains — once you have seen Tsikota’s drawings, they […]
In the illustrated editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Viktor Shatunov brings his long experience in book graphics to one of the most beloved classics of children’s literature. Lewis Carroll’s original stories — first published in 1865 and 1871 respectively — are known for their playful […]
Dhan Gopal Mukerji was perhaps the best-known Indian writer of the early 20th century who published in English. In the 1910s, he took part in the Bengali resistance, and at the age of twenty, he was forced to leave India. Soon after, he settled in New York. Cut off from […]
Shaydullah is a beggar who wants to know why his prayers go unanswered. One day, he sets off on a journey, visiting different people and asking for guidance. Each encounter gives him an answer, but it’s never quite what he expects — and Shaydullah struggles to put it into practice. […]
