I sell children's books on Ebay and have done so for the past three years, enjoying the experience immensely.There is  a goldmine of quality vintage juvenile literature out there just waiting to be discovered. Children's books today are dull, sanitized and boring, not so the ones of  the twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. The illustrators of the past such as Arthur Rackham ,in the classic Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie, make the stories come alive. In the original book, Peter Pan was an infant , not a young boy and this was a statement on the hight rate of infant mortality in Victorian times.

I worked with reluctant readers and students with dyslexia for many years in the schools and stumbled upon my thesis purely out of desperation.I was trying to encourage love of reading and learning in my little group aged 6 to 11 with the current books in our library. No cigar! Suddenly one day I brought in some antique books which I had purchased on Ebay for a display. To my surprise they all began to mill around me and wanted to read the books! In fact they wouldn't put them down and were actually fighting  over them. I had to assign numbers so that everyone could have a chance to read them. Not only that -I found that the early illustrators for Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, Peter Pan, Hansel and Grtetel  mesmerized them so that we started enlarging the pictures on a  copy machine and the students began to make books   to emulate the great Arthur Rackham's drawings.

If you haven't seen or heard of him- run to Ebay and click on his keyword to see his haunting illustrations. First editions from 1910-1920 run into the thousands to dollars but you can still manage to pick up later books  illustrated by him. Trying to get your child to read more? I suggest picking up some of the early gems in literature and forget the later watered down imitations.