by Robert Kraus

First Edition | Harper & Row | 1965

Update: This book has been sold!

Robert Kraus did not begin his career in the realm of children’s literature. Though he did start as a child himself. At age ten he won a local cartoon contest, by 12 he was employed at the Milwaukee Journal, and by 16 he was working for The New Yorker. So maybe it’s no surprise that, after spending 15 years with the magazine, Kraus pivoted his career and founded a small publishing house, Windmill Books, in 1965 (eventually purchased by Simon & Schuster in the 1980s) and turned his eye to the whimsical world of children’s literature. 

Gone were the portraits of gritty New York City and its denizens, replaced with rabbits and easter egg houses. With a penchant for anthropomorphic animals and life lessons, Kraus’ oeuvre of children’s stories evokes The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Hundred Acre Woods, The Wind in the Willows, and Frog & Toad. Small stories for small people (and animals!) that are well known to this day. 

But of all his works, perhaps none was so charming as The Bunny’s Nutshell Library, which he wrote and illustrated. One of three Nutshell Library collections published by Harper & Row in the 1960s–Maurice Sendak’s Nutshell Library in 1962, Hilary Knight’s Christmas Nutshell Library in 1963, and, finally, Robert Kraus’ The Bunny’s Nutshell Library in 1965–Kraus’ Nutshell Library consists of: The Silver Dandelion, The First Robin, Springfellow’s Parade, and Juniper, gentle stories about bullying, being accepted, loneliness, and friendship. 

The four charming tales in his collection, paired with their cozy illustrations, reflect that same childhood nostalgia that lives in all of us. When the world was very, very small and so were we–but our imaginations were oh so big.