Best in Children’s Books – The Complete List, Illustrated

Hi all

Today’s post is a companion to last week’s one on the Junior Deluxe Editions. The Best in Children’s Books series was also released by Doubleday, and they share enough design features with the JDE series that many casual readers conflate the two. But this series is quite different, and in fact although they were sold through a book club, they are not in fact true book club editions, since many of the stories and illustrations appeared for the first (and sometimes only) time in this format.

The artists who worked on the series were quite extraordinary, including such luminaries as Andy Warhol and Maurice Sendak. So they are certainly worth tracking down if you happen to live near a charity shop that has a bunch on their shelves.

In addition to listing all the books, the BICB bibliography page includes images of the covers (including many of the dust jackets, which are not commonly found with the books), a potted history of how the series was developed, and a searchable list of stories and artists included in each of the anthologies. There is also a second page that lists the contents of each volume, in case you would rather search by individual illustrator or author for the stories in each volume.

Enjoy!