The estimable British literary magazine, Slightly Foxed has published a pocket edition of Rosemary Sutcliff's 1983 autobiography Blue Remembered Hills.

Rosemary Sutcliff was our featured author of October 21, 2007. She is best remembered for her marvelous historical ficition which includes such classics as The Eagle of the Ninth and her retellings such as Black Ships Before Troy.

Should you wish a copy of Sutcliff's autobiography, Blue Remembered Hills, please contact Slightly Foxed directly at their site.

Abbeville Press has recently re-released four titles in their Classic Fairy Tales series.

Cinderella by Charles Perrault and illustrated by Edith Baudrand Suggested

City Mouse & Country Mouse by Isabelle Chatellard Suggested

The Princess and the Pea by Hans Christian Andersen and illustrated by Camille Semelet Suggested

The Three Little Pigs by Agnes Mathieu Suggested

Yesterday I spoke with Steve Hill, founder along with Peggy Hogan, of Flying Point Press. They have set out to fill an under-served niche in the market-place of children's books. They are focusing on historical non-fiction books with a strong narrative line for 10-15 year old independent readers.

While they have a handful of new titles that they have published, much of what they are doing, and which is near to the TTMD heart, is salvaging the great books of yesteryear which have sunk beneath the tsunami of contemporary titles. One of the lost galleons to which they have returned is the Landmark series of books from the 1950's and 1960's, originally published by Random House under the auspices of legendary editor and company founder Bennett Cerf. It sounds as if one of the more intriguing aspects of this effort at resurrecting forgotten favorites was the act of simply finding the original authors (or their estates) and obtaining rights to republish.

Just take a look below at the titles, which are intriguing enough, but then also at the authors. I was startled to see just how many were by well established adult authors and historians and whom I never realized had ever ventured into children's books. There are, for example, William Shirer (author of the magisterial The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich first published in 1960 and still in print), John Gunther (author of the still available Death Be Not Proud, but known at the time primarily for his Inside series of books as in Inside Europe), Sterling North (Featured Author of September 23, 2007 and author of Rascal), Armstrong Sperry (author of 1941 Newberry Medal winner Call It Courage), Alistair Maclean (the 1950/60s spy/mystery writer best know for The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra, and Night Without End ), C.S. Forester (best known for the Horatio Hornblower series and African Queen ), etc. Clearly there is no dearth of talent for action-packed tales in this crew.

Abraham Lincoln Friend of the People by Clara Ingram Judson

Admiral Richard Byrd Alone in the Antarctic by Paul Rink

Alexander the Great by John Gunther

Amelia Earhart Flying Solo by John Burke

Battle in the Arctic Seas by Theodore Taylor

Behind Enemy Lines A Young Pilot's Story by H.R. Demallie

Ben Franklin Inventing America by Thomas Fleming

Daniel Boone The Opening of the Wilderness by John Mason Brown

General George Patton Old Blood and Guts by Alden Hatch

George Washington Frontier Colonel by Sterling North

Geronimo Wolf of the Warpath by Ralph Moody

Invasion The Story of D-Day by Bruce Bliven, Jr.

Jamestown The Perilous Adventure by Olga Hall-Quest

Joan of Arc Warrior Saint by Jay Williams

John Paul Jones The Pirate Patriot by Armstrong Sperry

Lawrence of Arabia by Alistair Maclean

Lee and Grant at Appomattox by MacKinlay Kantor

Path to the Pacific The Story of Sacagawea by Neta Lohnes Frazier

Stampede for Gold The Story of the Klondike Rush by Pierre Berton

Teddy Roosevelt American Rough Rider by John A. Garrity

The Barbary Pirates by C.S. Forester

The Sinking of the Bismark The Deadly Hunt by William Shirer

The Stout-Hearted Seven Orphaned on the Oregon Trail by Neta Lohnes Frazier

Thermopylae © Look and Learn Magazine Ltd

England in the 1960's and 70's had some wonderful hybrid children's magazines. By hybrid I mean that they typically carried both standard comic book type material but also carried weightier strips that were informative and well illustrated.

I subscribed for many years to a long since defunct magazine World of Wonder. One of it's competitors was Look and Learn, also long since having passed into memory.

I see that some group has now purchased the rights to the old Look and Learn magazine and are republishing it. As they describe it you can subscribe for "24 or 48 issues of the best of the original Look and Learn, printed to have the same look and feel as the original. Spanning history, legend, literature, art, philosophy, nature, science and geography, the best of Look and Learn showcases the work of the brilliant illustrators and writers who worked on the original magazine over the course of its 20 year run. It also contains a number of extraordinary comic strips, including Don Lawrence's famous 'The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire'."

If you are an old anglophile (or a new one for that matter), love old-style children's magazines, or want worthwhile reading material in comic magazine format, you might want to visit the Look and Learn website to consider subscribing.

Thomas' Engine Shed by Rev. W. Awdry

I am so delighted to see this edition coming back into print. While expensive ($175), this is by far the best set of Thomas stories you can have. It is the complete collection of 26 Thomas books (usually with two or three separate stories in each book) written by W. Awdry, with the original illustrators and in the compact format best suited for young hands. This edition has been unavailable in the US for many years and I am delighted that it is available again (due out in September but can be back-ordered) as I believe the original versions of the stories to be markedly superior to the numerous simplified and re-illustrated versions that have proliferated in recent years.

In fact, most people are unfamiliar with the original stories which retain a much more distinctive English character than later editions as well as more of a feel for England in the late forties and fifties where it might not be as unusual as it is now for the passengers to have to get out and walk back to the station, as seems to so often happen to the long-suffering patrons, owing to blocked lines, accidents, etc.

Thomas in the original series was also, I think, more characterful, frequently just a little too confident in his own capabilities and having to be brought down a peg. In later stories he became a little too anodyne for my tastes.

All three of our children loved these Thomas stories and they are the right size to snuggle up together to read and the right length for those brief snatches in the day when you might have five or fifteen minutes to read aloud.

Edward Ardizzone was a talented illustrator (illustrating more than 150 books) who ended up also writing a much-loved series of books about a young boy, Tim, and his various seaside/sailing adventures. There are eleven stories in the series, published between 1936 and 1977, eight of which are now, with these three titles reissued (Tim all Alone, Tim and Charlotte, and Tim in Danger), in print. The other five are Tim to the Rescue, Tim to the Lighthouse, Tim and Ginger, Tim and Lucy Go to Sea, and Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain.
Perfect for any adventure loving child, anyone interested in the sea, and for children who want to see a model of other children functioning independently (though often improbably) in an adult's world.

The University of Minnesota Press has a nice line up of most of Wanda Gag's books including a reissue of two of the titles that have always been a little harder to find, Tales from Grimm and More Tales from Grimm. These collections are a nice introduction to the Grimm tales for younger children with some of the dark strains of the original Grimm tales lightened but without being bowdlerized.