Animals, Home and Today

Three volumes of The Junior Classics, the anthology for young readers first published by P. F. Collier in 1912, bound as one: animal and nature stories — a grizzly cub raised by hand, a fight with a catamount, a lynx in Canada, horses and dogs of every temper; old-fashioned tales of the kind their grandparents were raised on; and stories of the writers' own day. The pieces were chosen to be read aloud or alone, and they still work both ways. Fifty-one plates after Constable and Corot, from The White Horse to farm carts and woody landscapes, give the animal tales a painterly setting.