Ganesa, the elephant, may not be the most handsome of animals; but what he lacks in looks he compensates for in wisdom. "His library," we read, "was huge. He read even more greedily than he ate, and he ate all day long." Unlike his fiery and quarrelsome brother, he has no need to travel frantically around the world in search of knowledge and excitement, for these he will find in his books.
The reward he earns for this enthusiasm for the written word comes in the form of two brides who, as we leave them, are gazing around at Ganesa's shelves of books and scrolls, smiling "as though they had just been given the world for a wedding present".
This delightful Indian legend, celebrating the primacy of story and of books, is to be found in Geraldine McCaughrean's sumptuously produced Myths and Legends of the World: The Bronze Cauldron (Orion, £14.99 in UK), richly and evocatively illustrated in full colour by Bee Willey. McCaughrean and Willey combine, in their selection of 27 retellings, to remind us of story's universal and timeless appeal and of its role in illuminating the joys and sorrows of our everyday existences. It is difficult to imagine a more vibrant introduction to our annual Children's Books festivities than this one.
When a publisher issues yet another version of a story as well known as Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes we can only hope that the quality of the presentation will justify the exercise. This expectation is more than met in Naomi Lewis's new translation (Walker, £10.99 in UK) and, even more stunningly, in Angela Barrett's accompanying paintings. Barrett places her interpretation in a small unnamed European kingdom, circa 1913, a device which gives her imagination full scope to resurrect the fashionable details of the privileged lives of the belle epoque. But it is an elegance which teeters on decadence, totally in keeping with the appearance versus reality motif which dominates the original Andersen story.
Of contemporary children's writers who transfer the mood and landscape of ancient legend and fairy tale to modern story there are few who do so to such effect as William Mayne. To read a book such as Hob and the Pedlar (Dorling Kindersley, £8.99 in UK) is to enter two worlds simultaneously. On one level, there is Hob himself, the invisible house-spirit of ancient but uncertain lineage, whose function and attributes recall those of Ariel and Puck. On another, there is the perfectly ordinary family with whom he collaborates in penetrating the mystery lying beneath their garden pond. Mayne's skill, manifest in his sly and knowing prose, ensures that the levels are eerily, but credibly, integrated.
While Gareth Owen's Rosie No-Name and the Forest of Forgetting (Oxford, £3.99 in UK) achieves some of this successful mingling of eerie and credible storyline, it suffers slightly from being in the genre of book within a book: art and artifice are not here always compatible companions. There are certainly some highly atmospheric moments, particularly those which echo traditional tale and legend, as we follow amnesiac Rosie through the forest where she drifts into the company of Alastair, a boy of her own age though clearly from a different time. But their wanderings go on far too long, resulting in our loss of interest in their shared plight and in a final sense that present and past worlds are too tenuously joined.
Finally - with perfect timing for the darkening evenings - comes Chills in the Night, an excellent collection of eight stories by Jackie Vivelo (Dorling Kindersley, £8.99 in UK). As the subtitle ("Tales That Will Haunt You") indicates, these are in the ghost story mode, but they focus on the subtleties of mood, setting and characterisation rather than on sensational ghoulishness. The author's tone is seductively conversational, enticing us from the everyday context in which each story begins to those dark places where it inevitably ends. The frissons here are sharp and real: the stories, as young Nathan describes what he reads in the one called The Fireside Book of Ghost Stories, are "not the kind of thing you want to have in mind when you're trying to fall asleep in the dark".
(Robert Dunbar has recently edited First Times, a volume of short stories for young adults, for Poolbeg Press.)