February 25, 2026 Explore the History of Children’s Literature in New Collection Close-Up Book

From Puritan primers to Percy Jackson, “Tell Me a Story: Fantastic Children’s Books from the Library of Congress” explores the Library’s extensive children’s literature collections, turning up gems from the colonial era to the present. This newest book in the Library’s Collection Close-Up series publishes Feb. 25.

“Tell Me a Story” reimagines the canon of American children’s literature while tracing the evolution of literary, artistic and publishing trends. From classic books and award-winners to lesser-known works ready for rediscovery, this volume features more than 200 children’s books, original artworks and manuscript pages, all created, read and sold in the United States.

As National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Mac Barnett writes in his foreword to the book, children’s literature is a “huge and varied realm,” including books written for kids, at kids, and even “books written for adults that children discover and wind up loving most.” In this compendium, readers will find picture books, middle grade and young adult novels, nonfiction, comic books, magazines, poetry, songbooks and more. Beloved characters like Dorothy and Toto or Frog and Toad appear, along with rarely seen manuscripts and original artwork by Virginia Hamilton, Jerry Pinkney, Chris Raschka and Vera B. Williams.

Guest contributors include seven former national ambassadors: Kate DiCamillo, Meg Medina, Katherine Paterson, Jason Reynolds, Jon Scieszka, Jacqueline Woodson and Gene Luen Yang. They share reflections on their own sources of inspiration as young people, showing how pivotal books can be to shaping a child’s life. Although former national ambassador Walter Dean Myers passed away in 2014, he is represented through the excerpt of an essay he wrote for The New York Times touching on many of the same themes.

This book is the fourth installment in the Library’s Collection Close-Up series, which celebrates the variety, breadth and depth of Library of Congress collections. These compact and accessible books bring Library collections to life through historical anecdotes, colorful images, and descriptive captions and sidebars.

Author Hannah Freece is a writer-editor in the Library’s Publishing Office. She is the co-author of “Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote” and “The Joy of Looking: Great Photographs from the Library of Congress.”

Published by the Library of Congress and distributed by the University of North Carolina Press, “Tell Me a Story” will be available in paperback in the Library of Congress Store and via booksellers everywhere beginning Feb. 25.

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