Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories is one of the best-loved story collections ever written for children. In this companion to Volume I, acclaimed children’s book illustrator Ian Wallace once again reinterprets the famous tales with luminous art, bringing Kipling to a new generation of young readers. Many of the tales are origin stories, explaining, for example, how an animal came to be, or the how the alphabet and writing began. They all display Kipling’s vivid imagination, inventive vocabulary, and engaging wordplay. And once again Ian Wallace makes intriguing connections between the stories in his richly imagined illustrations. This volume includes “The Beginning of the Armadillos,” “How the First Letter Was Written,” “How the Alphabet Was Made,” The Crab That Played with the Sea,” “The Cat That Walked by Himself” and “The Butterfly That Stamped.” The first edition of Just So Stories was published in Great Britain in 1902, along with black-and-white illustrations by Kipling himself. The stories have remained in print ever since, delighting young readers in many countries.

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was born in India, where he returned for a time and began to write after years of schooling in England. His best-known children’s works include The Jungle Book, Kim and Just So Stories. Kipling achieved high acclaim as an author of books for children and adults, winning the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Literature and the Nobel Prize in Literature, among many other awards. Ian Wallace has had a distinguished career as an author and illustrator of picture books. He has won the Elizabeth Mrazik-Cleaver Picture Book Award, the Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon Award, and the IODE Violet Downey Book Award. He has also been nominated for the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award. He lives in Brookline, MA.