Over thirty years ago a young library assistant was put in charge of a modern children's library in the industrial north, with little idea of what lay behind the range and variety of the many children's books invitingly set out in bright covers on the shelves, or how the classics and popular favourites had come into being.

Introduction.

The sources of present-day books for young people go back far beyond the middle of the fifteenth century, when the invention of printing with movable type began to transform the dissemination of knowledge and ideas, and so help to shape the modern world.

One. Sources.