Böcker i Everyman's Library CHILDREN'S CLASSICS-serien

The legends of King Arthur - the most revered hero of British Mythology - have been retold many times, but Roger Lancelyn Green's version has become a classic since its first publication in 1953.

Everyone knows Pinocchio, the walking, talking wooden puppet carved from a table leg. Sold to a circus, then to a man who tries to drown him for his donkey-skin, he miraculously turns back into a puppet and goes in search of his 'father' (whom he must rescue from the belly of a giant dogfish ...).

The sole survivor of a shipwreck, Robinson Crusoe is stranded on an uninhabited island far away from any shipping routes. With patience and ingenuity, he transforms his island into a tropical paradise. For twenty-four years he has no human company, until one Friday, he rescues a prisoner from a boat of cannibals.

The story of Robin Hood, said Roger Lancelyn Green can never die, nor cease to fire the imagination. Roger Lancelyn Green has used as his sources the ballads, romances and plays, as well as the literary retellings of Noyes, Tennyson, Peacock and Scott.

Around the year 117 AD, the Ninth Legion, stationed at Eburacum - modern day York - marched north to suppress a rebellion of the Caledonian tribes, and was never heard of again. During the 1860s, a wingless Roman Eagle was discovered during excavations at the village of Silchester in Hampshire, puzzling archaeologists and scholars alike.

With 13 children of his own clamouring for bedtime stories it isn't surprising that author George MacDonald discovered he had a gift for composing fairy tales.

When Kay gets a splinter of the wicked troll's magic mirror in his heart it becomes hard and cold - just like a lump of ice. Kay is abducted and bewitched by the chillingly beautiful Snow Queen and his loyal sister, Gerda is prepared to face anything to find her brother and bring him home.

Since then the stories have been constantly reprinted and, despite the author's disclaimer, children have made the tales their own, a particular favourite being 'The Selfish Giant' - the highly moral story of the giant who banished children from his garden, so that spring never came.

Stevenson's great adventure story, set in the 18th century, was conceived in the Scottish Highlands, where the author and his 12-year-old stepson amused themselves by making a map that showed the location of buried treasure on an island. The illustrations first appeared in 1949.

Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales originally appeared in batches each Christmas in the mid-19th century, and Spink's English translation was first published in 1960. This edition has Heath Robinson's illustrations, dating from 1899.

Written in six weeks, and at first thought by its editor to be 'dull', this story of an American family - four sisters and their mother living through the months while father is away in the Civil War - has a universal and enduring appeal.

The story of Jack, the intrepid little boy whose courage and ingenuity defeated a host of many-headed giants several times his size, is an English folk-tale that must have been told often in the Victorian nursery of the Doyle family.

When Heidi, a five-year-old orphan, is dumped on her reclusive grandfather who lives on a remote mountainside above a Swiss village, he is none too pleased by her arrival.

Dumas' most popular novel, The Three Musketeers, has long been a favourite with children, and its heroes are well-known from many a film and TV adaption.

Aesop is believed to have lived in the sixth century B.C., a slave on the Greek island of Samos. The Fables had already been popular for centuries before Roger L'Estrange published a new English translation in 1692, with the declared intention of making a comprehensive selection addressed to children.

The most popular of all ghost stories was first published on 17 December 1843, and by Christmas Eve 6, 000 copies had been sold at a published price of five shillings.

Written during World War II, The Little Prince tells of the friendship between the narrator, an aviator stranded in the Sahara desert, and a mysterious boy whom he encounters there.

Auntie Katusha has just come from the Old Country, bringing poppy seeds to make cakes for a mischievous four-year-old boy named Andrewshek. A little neighbour, Erminka, who wears red boots which are too big for her, joins Andrewshek for a series of adventures with talking animals, including a greedy goose who steals the cakes;

'The very essence of all illustration for children's books' said The Times on Christmas Eve, 1878, shortly after the publication of Caldecott's first two picture books, or Toy Books as they were called, John Gilpin and The House that Jack Built.

H.' The game's afoot for the most famous amateur detective of all time in this collection of eight of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic tales. 'The Speckled Band', a Victorian melodrama in a country house, comes complete with murderous villain, murdered heroine, and a very unpleasant snake;

But when the tribe signs a treaty that requires them to return their white captives, 15-year-old True Son is returned against his will to the family he had long forgotten, and to a life that he no longer understands or desires.

Wonderful collection of nonsense verse, from Chesterton to Dahl, Lear to Carroll. With beautitul, original illustrations, both full colour and black & white.

The exotically named Baroness Orczy was the daughter of a Hungarian aristocrat who came to London at the age of fifteen. Everyman's Library Children's Classics publishes the novel in a new and up-to-date edition to tie in with the BBC production to be screened this Christmas.

The story of the Spanish knight Don Quizote whose devotion to the tales of chivalry leads him into a series of bizarre adventures in the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, blends fantasy, comedy and gripping narrative in a way that has appealed to children ever since it was first published.

Originally published as a serial in the children's monthly magazine ST NICHOLAS, LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY was Frances Hodgson Burnett's first children's novel and on its publication in book form in October 1866 it became at once an astonishing success.

The appeal of this Canadian classic children's book is seemingly everlasting - for it is a story of an individual making good by her own efforts, an orphaned girl sent to live with an elderly brother and sister who really want a boy to help on the farm.

A tale of a girl and a vegetarian giant with an odd manner of speaking, who together save the country from Fleshlumpeater, Bonecruncher, Gizzardgulper and other hideous giants.

' The author invited Arthur Rackham to illustrate his book, but Rackham said he was too busy - a decision he was happily able to reconsider in 1936 when he was approached by the American publisher of the Limited Editions Club.