Rudyard Kipling’s classic stories are beautifully presented in this highly attractive edition enhanced with eight stunning colour illustrations by Chris Riddell as well as by Kipling’s own illustrations – including his most famous one of The Elephant’s Child. Kipling’s versions of how different animals have come by their characteristic- How the Leopard Got his Spots, How the Whale Got His Throat, The Cat that Walked By Itself and the others remains one of the best books to read aloud to any one from 5 upwards.
Rudyard Kipling told his children gloriously fanciful tales of how things in the world came to be as they are. He wrote them down for publication as Just So Stories in 1902, just three years after the tragic death of his daughter Josephine for whom they had first been created.
During the twentieth century, generations of children were tucked into bed with readings of highly imaginative and wildly improbable explanations such as how the elephant got his trunk, how the leopard got his spots, and how the alphabet was made. Kipling's children's books were popular for much of the 20th century and Just So Stories remains a children's favourite across the English-speaking world.
Kipling provided his own woodcut illustrations for his Just So Stories, which feature in this edition. Together with his long, hilarious captions, they are the perfect accompaniment to his classic children's stories, and in true Kipling style, contain hidden jokes and puzzles.
Just So Stories was the first book I ever truly loved Michael Morpurgo
Author
About Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865. He was educated in England but returned to India as an adult and worked as a journalist. There, he produced stories, sketches and poems that made him a literary celebrity when he returned to England in 1888. After their marriage, Kipling and his wife moved to Vermont, where he wrote The Jungle Book. Published in 1894, it became a children's classic all over the world. Tales of every kind, including historical and science fiction, continued to flow from his pen, including Kim (1901) and the Just So Stories (1902). From 1902 Kipling made his home in Sussex, but continued to travel widely and caught his first glimpse of warfare in South Africa, where he reported in the Boer War. Kipling was the recipient of many honorary degrees and other awards. He was the first writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1907, and in 1926 he received the Gold Medal of the royal Society of Literature. Kipling died in 1936.
