Most literary anniversaries are pointless, but they have the merit of making us think, golly, is the book really this old? So it is with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, seventy-five years old this year. To mark the occasion, the present publisher, HarperCollins, has reissued it in a lovely hardback edition with one of the original Pauline Baynes pictures on the cover, of Aslan the lion romping with the two girls of the story. For this is one of the books which is inseparable from its illustrator; the Narnia stories without Pauline Baynes’s captivating pictures of children of the 1950s and creatures of medieval legend would be incomplete.
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Return to Narnia
A timeless classic returns in a new edition, revealing the deeper imagination, theology and brilliance of Narnia
Melanie McDonagh

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