children's classics - online and off

One of the first things we did when we learned we were expecting the pumpkin was to visit the parenting section of the nearest big bookstore. This turns out to be a small wall of shelves in the children's books section. I grabbed a couple of books -- one on expectant fatherhood, the other on how to buy baby stuff less expensively -- and then quickly grew bored of the whole section and wandered into the children's area while maman-to-be sat down and went through one of the bigger books pretty thoroughly.

I discovered three things about children's books:

1. they make great kid's books from non-paper materials (like a soft vinyl copy of One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish that you can take in the bath, plus plenty of soft cloth books that junior can't tear or ruin by chewing on the pages);
2. they still have all the books I remember from childhood;
3. it matters to me that our child have books from my childhood.

One of my favorite books was Clifford The Big Red Dog. They're producing some new books with Clifford, but it's the original I'm fond of. We bought a copy for a friend of ours who is recently a new mom.


Another favorite is Are You My Mother. We got a cloth version of that one for another friend of ours who is also a new mother. (Yes, it seems that every woman we know is either a new mother, newly expecting, or trying to become newly expecting.)

Meanwhile, for prenatal story time, I've now read Wizard of Oz and Alice In Wonderland to Nathalie's roundening belly.

What to read next? We'll eventually get to the Oz and Alice sequels, but I want to read something new first. Something old to the world but new to us. I think I might do the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. You'll notice that last link takes you to Project Gutenberg. Another source for electronic copy of classic literature is just across town from our house: University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center. I mention this because our prenatal reading is all of electronic text. In the position we've come up with that allows both maman and papa to be relatively comfortable while papa's mouth is up against the curve beneath maman's belly button, papa only has one hand free. Paper books just won't do. But a laptop only requires one finger to progress through a book as I read from the screen.

So here are my two requests for your input:

1. What childhood classics (where classics needn't be older than the 1970s) do you recommend we make sure are in the pumpkin's library? I'm talking physical books here, whether paper, cardboard, vinyl, or cloth.
2. What childhood classics (where classics probably means out-of-copyright in this case) do you know are available in electronic text? Adobe PDF files, HTML, plain text -- those are our formats.

I welcome your input and I thank you for your recommendations, suggestions, or advice.

- papa