Aunt Friendly's Picture Book.

Originally published in the 1870s, this Victorian collection gathers nursery staples — the alphabet, Sing a Song of Sixpence, Puss in Boots, The Ugly Duckling — illustrated with thirty-six pages of chromolithographic color pictures by Joseph Martin Kronheim. The charm is real: it's a genuine artifact of 19th-century childhood, and the public-domain text is freely available through Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, making it accessible to anyone. The archaic language and episodic structure won't suit every young reader today, and there's no narrative thread connecting the pieces. But as a window into Victorian picture-book tradition — or a free read-aloud source for classic tales — it's a worthy find for families and collectors who appreciate where children's literature came from.