Children’s literature today enjoys centrality in cultural awareness and constitutes such a sizeable proportion of new educational materials that it is hard to imagine publishing activity without it. However, although children’s literature is today a “natural” phenomenon taken for granted in any national literature, it is a relatively new development – less than two hundred years old. Books written especially for children were virtually unknown until the eighteenth century and the children’s book industry did not begin to flourish until the second half of the nineteenth century when adult literature in the modern sense had already been established for at least one hundred ...