Putting away the fear of childishness

Go to any bookshop — always supposing you’re fortunate enough to have any left in your neck of the woods — and chances are that lots of window space will be given over to two genres — children’s books and cookbooks. Step inside, and the children’s books are under your nose. Last year, children’s books were the fastest growing section of the books market.

Yet the amount of space given over to children’s fiction and literature in the forums — newspapers and arts programmes — where we talk about books is remarkably small. We brood endlessly over Bookerish novels; when it comes to children’s, however, the genre is generally lumped together in a round-up a couple of times a year in a bid to help out grandparents buy something suitable. The most dispiriting result of that quest for Christmas and birthday presents is the gift book, a handsomely bound, expensive, finely illustrated thing, preferably a classic, that no child will actually read.