Children Nesbit, Edith: The Story of the Treasure Seekers (Illus). v2. 19 Oct 2016

[GrannyGrump]

The Story of the Treasure Seekers by Edith Nesbit (1858–1924)
With fifteen illustrations by Gordon Browne (1858–1932)

First published in 1899.
The text and illustrations of this book are in the public domain in countries where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA.

Edith Nesbit Bland, English author and poet, published approximately 40 books for children under the name of E. Nesbit. She created an innovative body of work that combined realistic, contemporary children in real-world settings with magical objects and adventures and sometimes travel to fantastic worlds. In doing so, she was a direct or indirect influence on many subsequent writers, including P. L. Travers (author of “Mary Poppins”), Edward Eager (author of the “Magic” series), Diana Wynne Jones (“Chrestomanci”), J. K. Rowling (“Harry Potter”), and C. S. Lewis (“Narnia”). (—Excerpted from Wikipedia.)

“The Treasure Seekers” is Nesbit’s first book, and the first in a series of three books about the six Bastable children. When their father's business fails, the children decide to restore the fortunes of “the ancient House of Bastable.” But although they think of many ingenious ways to do so, their well-meant efforts are either more fun than profitable, or lead to trouble. As with all the books in this series, many of the chapters first appeared as magazine short stories, and thus are episodic and self-contained. This fact, and the subtle touches of humor clearly aimed at the adult reader, make them ideal for bed-time read-aloud by the local grown-up.

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Text and illustrations were obtained from archive.org. Due to copyright restrictions, I excluded two first-edition illustrations by Lewis Baumer (1870–1963). Images were manually cleaned and enhanced. I formatted punctuation, diacritics, and italics. Chapter heads are cross-linked to in-line Table of Contents; image captions cross-linked to List of Illustrations. Embedded redistributable fonts are used for titles, chapter-heads and small caps.

I only learned about Edith Nesbit a short while ago, and find her books for both adults and children to be delightful. I hope you do too.

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EDIT --- Uploaded version 2, with glossary added and some error corrections and format tweaks. Previous downloads: 45

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[GrannyGrump]

I have just uploaded version 2.

I have added a glossary, annotating terms no longer in general use, and/or used mainly in Great Britain.

Also a few error corrections and formatting tweaks, and illustrations in higher resolution.