Winnie the Pooh Universe

Somewhere at the top of the Forest, under the name of Sanders, lives a Bear of Very Little Brain who is fond of honey and of humming. Around him the Hundred Acre Wood gathers its company: Piglet, who is small and brave about it; Eeyore, gloomy in his boggy corner; Kanga and Roo; Rabbit and all his friends-and-relations; Owl, who can spell Tuesday; and the boy Christopher Robin, for whom every bit of it is real. A. A. Milne made this world out of his son's nursery toys and Ernest H. Shepard drew it into permanence — the bridge where Poohsticks is invented, the North Pole discovered on an expotition, the tail nailed back on. The whole of it is two short books. Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) is ten stories told to Christopher Robin at bedtime; The House at Pooh Corner (1928) brings Tigger bouncing in and ends, in the enchanted place at the top of the Forest, with the gentlest farewell in children's literature. Milne's two books of verse stand beside them, and the catalogue also carries single chapters reissued as picture books and later tales by other hands, made in the wake of the films, which borrow the names for something lighter. The pleasure is the voice: Milne's dry, loving narrator, the capital letters that turn a Small Animal into a Character, and a wisdom that arrives disguised as nonsense. Read Winnie-the-Pooh first and The House at Pooh Corner second, and stop there — the last chapter was written to be an ending.