Explore My Super-Secret Archive of Incredibly Illustrated Children’s Books

My love of the New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book list is well-documented. A few years back, I decided to try to track down as many of the past winners as I could. But I ran into a few problems:

Problem #1: Finding the full list of winners.

It’s trickier than it might seem. But I tracked down a fairly reliable list, before running into the next problem . . .

Problem #2: Actually finding all the books.

Once I had a list of all the books, I wanted to read them. There are a few ways to do this: look in my local library (which had very few of the books), interlibrary loan (more books, but harder to get), or buy them used (from places like AbeBooks – but that gets expensive quick).

Then I had another idea: what if some of them were available through the Internet Archive? Lots of big library systems spent a lot of time scanning books and offering them up for free on the site.

I started searching around and I found a ton of them. And now I’m sharing them with you.

Most of the books appeared on the NYT Best Illustrated list, but many were just books by illustrators that I wanted to investigate further. The result is a pretty big group of incredibly illustrated children’s books that are worth checking out.

Click here to see them.

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