Children's Literature

Children's Literature are books designed for children, or books that children can read with interest, including fiction, poetry, biography, and history. Children's literature also includes riddles, percepts, fables, legends, myths, and folk lore based upon written or spoken traditional stories. Primitive or very ancient literature, such as the Babylonian animal stories or the books of Homer, is often adapted to children's literature because of the simple narrative form of such books and stories.

Until the Renaissance the main sources of children's literature in the West were the Bible and the Greek and Latin classic books. The expansion of literacy following the invention of book printing in the 15Th century increased the range of children's literature, and a new source became the stories of national history. Following the 18Th century archaeologists, philologists, and anthropologists began adding material for stories from the history of various world cultures and previously unused European folklore. Typical of these new stories are the many children's literature books related to American and British history.

The modern publishers of leather bound books have printed numerous children's literature books including such titles as the many Disney stories, A. A. Milne's Winnie The Pooh stories, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz stories, and hundreds of other children's literature books.