Picture This, The British Library

'What is the use of a book', thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’ It’s a question you might well be asking yourself on leaving the British Library’s beautiful winter exhibition Picture This: Children’s Illustrated Classics - a treat for book lovers of any age.







Concentrating on 10 beloved children’s titles from the 20th century, from Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows to JRR Tolkein’s The Hobbit and Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the exhibition will explore how illustrators –authors included– have interpreted and reinterpreted these timeless stories for different generations.







Illustrations can, after all, drastically shape our response to writing, and the greatest collaborations leave words and pictures inextricably bound for a lifetime – who, now, can think of Dahl’s wondrously twisted tales without picturing Quentin Blake’s anarchic line drawings? Exhibitions like this remind us just how seminal those early reading experiences are. Kids will no doubt love seeing the changing faces of Paddington Bear and Peter Pan over the years, but it’s adults reliving their own childhood memories who are likely to be the most thrilled.







This unashamedly nostalgic appreciation of visual storytelling will be on show in the relaxed Folio Society Gallery space in the Library’s entrance hall –which fits, given Folio’s traditional (and somewhat endangered) philosophy that great reads should also be great lookers. But before you leave, be sure to drop into the Library’s extraordinary manuscripts room, where you’ll find plenty more gems, including Alice herself, as imagined by Lewis Carroll in his own original hand-drawn manuscript, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground– a magical object that no discussion on illustrated children’s literature is complete without.









This stuff is gold dust, and yet it’s all entirely free to enjoy. There’s no excuse to miss it.