Ask a librarian, Collection spotlights, Our stories:
Ever wonder what books were available for children 200 years ago? Keen to try your hand at some eighteenth and nineteenth century board games?
Trace the development of children’s reading, learning and play with the Children’s Literature and Culture database.
In 1960 Albert Ullin founded the first children’s bookshop in Melbourne and named it the Little Bookroom. This tiny shop in the Metropole Arcade, followed by later expansions into other… Read More ›
Willy Pogany (born Vilmos Andras Pogany) was a prolific contributor during the Golden Age of children’s book illustration, whose career broadened from children’s book illustration to portraiture and set designs for opera and ballet.
The Robinson brothers, Thomas, Charles and William Heath delighted in referring to themselves as the three musketeers. They spent much of their early adult life in their father’s studio and later shared studios with one another, all three establishing themselves as book illustrators.
Arts & literature, Our stories:
Kay Nielsen’s delicate illustrations combined the exquisite motifs of the Art Nouveau movement with oriental influences. The elaborate, decorative artworks bring brilliant colour tinged with a hint of eeriness to the pages of children’s fairy tales.
Edmund Dulac published in the first decades of the twentieth century, at a time now recognised as a golden age of children’s book illustration.
Arthur Rackham’s haunting images in children’s fairy tales evoke a sense of mystery, even nightmare. They made him the leading decorative illustrator of the Edwardian era.
The brothers Samuel and William Calvert established a series of children’s books in the 1870s called Calvert’s Australian Picture Books, bringing wood block printing techniques developed by the English master printer Edmund Evans to Australia.
Randolph Caldecott (1846-1886) broke late 19th century conventions of children’s book illustration by interpreting stories rather than decorating them, peopling them with cheeky caricatures involved in chaotic escapades.
Walter Crane (1845-1915) is today best known for his ornately illustrated 19th century children’s books. He designed artwork for the British master printer Edmund Evans in a variety of capacities for ten years, before Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway joined him as Evans’ triumvirate of children’s Toy Book illustrators.
