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, […]
Fables is a 1980 picture book written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel. The book contains twenty original fables featuring all kinds of animal characters, from crocodiles and ostriches to pigs, camels, and owls. In 1981 it received the Caldecott Medal for illustration. Each fable takes up a single page and […]
Red Army Parade is a wordless picture book. It is colorful and festive, filled with light, mostly line-based illustrations that feel highly dynamic and rhythmic. Deyneka drew with colored strokes — red and gray, black and yellow — freely moving away from naturalistic color and often abandoning conventional perspective. Cavalry […]
Aleksandr Deyneka’s festive colors could also give way, even in children’s books, to the severity of everyday labor. What gives these books their energy is Deyneka’s admiration for difficult physical work. It is no coincidence that the hero of two of his books from 1930 became the electrician: a figure […]
Alexander Deyneka’s In the Clouds was first published in 1930 and later reissued several times. Dedicated entirely to aviation, the book presents readers with a kind of visual catalogue of flying machines and aeronautical equipment, from parachutes to military aircraft. There is almost no text apart from short captions such […]
The Tale of the Golden Cockerel illustrated by Vladimir Konashevich was published in 1949 and became one of the artist’s most celebrated interpretations of Alexander Pushkin’s fairy tales. Pushkin’s poem constantly shifts between satire, fantasy, and theatrical spectacle, and Konashevich follows this rhythm with remarkable ease. His illustrations balance elegance […]
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 […]
