Far too many dreary new children’s books are published while great ones, which spark imaginative sympathy, intellectual curiosity and a sense of adventure in a child, languish out of print. Half of my ideal library consists of books like these, which are out of print.

Rosemary Manning’s Green Smoke probably inspired the song, Puff the Magic Dragon. Susan discovers a vain, kindly dragon living in a cave on a Cornish beach. He tells her tales of his time at King Arthur’s court, and introduces her to a mermaid. Funny, lively, clever and sympathetic, it introduces young children to a very English kind of magic. A Continental classic is Peter Biegel’s The King of the Copper Mountain.(6+) which tells of a 1000 year old king whose heart must be kept going by the tales animals tell while his faithful doctor searches for a cure. Hauntingly mysterious, it’s about how stories defeat death.

Faber have reprinted some of Lucy M. Boston’s matchless Green Knowe series, a mixture of ghost-story, detective-story and history as a lonely child discovers the stories of his grandmother’s house. A Stranger at Green Knowe is the tragic tale of a gorilla who escapes from London Zoo to find brief friendship with a Chinese orphan. Maddeningly, it is unobtainable.

Hurrah for Jane Nissen, who has just reprinted JBS Haldane’s, My Friend Mr. Leakey (7+)! This collection of quirky tales about life with a practical magician is perfect for clever, funny children. It features a small naughty dragon, a genie butler and a top hat which can produce any kind of soup, but it is Haldane’s logical approach to magic, as a renowned scientist, which enchants.

E.Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet (9+) is the third in the Five Children & It trilogy, and probably my favourite work by my favourite children’s author. Nesbit wasn’t just brilliant at catching exactly the way children think, talk, quarrel and get into trouble during magical and unmagical adventures, she had a social conscience that suggests to comfortable middle-class children that they should share their luck. A time-travel story, hopping from Babylon to Ancient Egypt, it will get kids into the British Museum in a flash.

Elizabeth Goudge, Henrietta’s House (9+) is about Henrietta, a pleasingly plain and imperfect Edwardian girl living in the West Country. It’s about an enchanted birthday picnic in which everyone gets his or her hearts’ desire. Though not quite as magical as Goudge’s classic, The Little White Horse, it’s more moving and incidentally inspired my most recent novel.

I am currently driven mad by the boring way history is taught to 6-11 year olds. Roger Lancelyn Green’s, The Luck of Troy (9+) is the Iliad as seen through the eyes of 10-year-old Nico, the baby Helen brought with her when seduced by Paris. Why, why isn’t this, and Geoffrey Trease’s A Crown of Violet (9+) about a boy-playwright who helps Sophocles, in print? Jane Nissen’s list and the excellent new imprint Spitfire Books, aimed at republishing boys’ classics, are worth looking out for, but I won’t be happy until all of E.Nesbit’s backlist and that of Geoffrey Trease are back in print.

The Independent on Sunday November 2004