Eight dragons and the children who deal with them: a boy-king who opens a forbidden book and lets out the Red Dragon, dragons that arrive as small as gnats, an ice dragon at the North Pole, and a cockatrice in a cave. Nesbit published the collection in 1900 between her better-known books, and the tone is pure invention without a moral in sight. "The Book of Beasts" is the story other writers have been rewriting ever since. Forty-two plates by painters including Camille Corot and David Wilkie picture cottages, farmyards, horses and children, the everyday world these dragons interrupt.