The Children’s Bookshelf : Magic’s many forms: nerds and heroes, crazy quilts and baby blankets, good and bad dogs.

Magic comes in many forms, as the words and pictures of THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE (Blue Sky / Scholastic: $15.95; ages 4-8) prove. This stunning book is a collaboration between artists Leo and Diane Dillon (“Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears”) and poet Nancy Willard (“A Visit to William Blake’s House”). They bring to vivid new life the old folk tale--immortalized in Walt Disney’s “Fantasia”--about the magician’s assistant whose helpers get way out of hand. A nice twist: This time, the apprentice wizard-to-be is a girl.

Christmas magic turns ordinary children into heroes who save the North Pole from the clutches of evildoers in SANTA CALLS by William Joyce (Laura Geringer / HarperCollins: $18; ages 3-7). This epic-style adventure with other-worldly overtones is the stylish work of the artist who a few years back brought us the popular “Dinosaur Bob.”

And as if to prove that magic is also a modern-day thing, there’s THE WIZARD NEXT DOOR by Peter Glassman (William Morrow: $15; ages 4-7). Steven Kellogg (illustrator of an astounding 90 picture books for children, including “Pinkerton, Behave!”) provides the pictures for this tale of an ordinary-looking (some might even say, nerdy-looking) next-door neighbor with extraordinary powers that allow him to, for instance, show mastery over traffic gridlock and grade-school teachers bent on boring their charges to tears.

More magic of a mythical kind is celebrated in poems by Jack Prelutsky, author of the classic “New Kid on the Block.” His THE DRAGONS ARE SINGING TONIGHT (Greenwillow: $15.95; ages 3-8) , with elaborate gilt-edged pictures by Peter Sis, makes us yet more certain that Prelutsky is one of the funniest guys going. “Art can be more than a picture on the wall,” says Faith Ringgold about the idea behind her new book, DINNER AT AUNT CONNIE’S HOUSE (Hyperion: $14.95; age 7 and up), in which 12 paintings of famous African-American women begin talking at the family table. Readers wanting to know more about this immensely talented author-illustrator (who also wrote “Tar Beach”) will enjoy Robyn Montana Turner’s FAITH RINGGOLD (Little, Brown: $15.95; ages 8 and up) , one of a series of “Portraits of Women Artists for Children.” In this plentifully illustrated book the author traces Ringgold’s career from her Harlem childhood in the 1930s to her present fame as a world-renowned quilt artist. More fascinating stuff about African-American artists is found in STITCHING STARS: The Story Quilts of Harriet Powers (Scribners: $15.95; ages 8 and up), an account of a poor Georgia mother of 11 whose appliqued fabric art now hangs in the Smithsonian Institution and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and STARTING OVER: The Story of Horace Pippin, Painter (Scribners: $15.95; ages 8 and up) , about a self-taught Pennsylvania man who painted despite a disabling wound from World War I. These first two entries in a new “African-American Artists and Artisans” series are written by Mary E. Lyons, author of an award-winning biography of Zora Neale Hurston as well as “Letters From a Slave Girl,” last year’s ALA Best Book for Young Adults.

In NOW EVERYBODY REALLY HATES ME by Jane Read Martin and Patricia Marx, illustrated by Roz Chast (HarperCollins: $14; ages 4-8) , older sister Patty Jane Pepper decides the only solution to the miseries of her existence is to sequester herself in her room forever and ever (unless, of course, there happens to be something going down on the dinner menu).

In OWEN, written and illustrated by Kevin Henkes (Greenwillow: $14; ages 2-5), a little mouse finds great comfort in the ever-present companionship of Fuzzy, an aging yellow blanket (“Fuzzy was essential when it came to nail clippings and haircuts and trips to the dentist”). But school is about to start, and it looks as though Owen and Fuzzy will have to part--until a creative solution (the altering of Fuzzy-the-blanket into Fuzzy-the-hankies) is found.

The beloved baby-blanket is also central to the suspenseful plot of SOMETHING FROM NOTHING, adapted from a Jewish folk tale and illustrated by Phoebe Gilman (Scholastic: $14.95). This beautiful book, with full-page paintings tinted a golden antique hue, is set in an Eastern European shtetl , where a tailor has fashioned a blue blanket speckled with stars for his new grandson Joseph. As the years go by, it’s reduced from a blanket to a coat to a vest to a handkerchief to a button, which one day gets lost. “The button is gone, finished, kaput,” his family tells him. “Even your grandfather can’t make something from nothing.” But Joseph does make something--a story about a blanket that becomes a coat, and so on.

Collecting antique photos of children has long been author Walter Dean Myers’ unusual hobby. In BROWN ANGELS: An Album of Pictures and Verse (HarperCollins: $16; all ages), Myers, author of popular young adult novels, including “Motown & Didi” proves himself to be no slouch at fashioning a poem either.

After making her picture book debut in last year’s “Cinderella,” that photogenic Weimaraner Fay Ray is back, in LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD by William Wegman (Hyperion: $16.95). Fay and her canine colleagues Battina and Chundo appear in color Polaroids by art photographer Wegman--whose masterpiece in this book is the shot of the devious “wolf” posing in bed under a crocheted afghan with wire-rimmed granny glasses, wicked leer and all.

Another popular working dog of the picture book world is the good-natured Rottweiler named Carl (of “Good Dog, Carl!” and other adventures), starring this year in CARL GOES TO DAY CARE by Alexandra Day (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $12.95; ages 1-5). Teacher gets locked out of nursery school that morning, so Carl must take charge--which he does with aplomb, even settling the wild-and-crazy toddlers down for a nap before morning’s end, and before teacher’s re-entry.

CONGA CROCODILE (Houghton Mifflin: $14.95; ages 3-7), by “Rotten Ralph” author Nicole Rubel, is a similarly irrepressible sort of beast. Conga is born to drum (in fact, even before his birth, we see his mother at the obstetrician’s, an emphatic--if somewhat muffled--”bam-bam-bam” emanating from her rounded tummy). But budding artists often buck a hostile world, and it’s a hard road we see Conga travel before he ends up a grown-up drummer in L.A., famous enough to endorse headache remedies on TV.

In the category of disappointments--and only mentioned here in the spirit of “buyer beware”--are the latest efforts of Chris Van Allsburg and David Macaulay. Van Allsburg’s THE SWEETEST FIG (Houghton Mifflin: $17.95) is an impeccably illustrated but utterly nasty tale in which a money-grubbing dentist gets his just desserts. David Macaulay’s “The Cathedral” may deserve to be a classic, but his new book, THE SHIP (Houghton Mifflin: $19.95), with its murky, muddy watercolor illustrations, is merely dull and didactic.

On a livelier note, holiday celebrations from many places and cultures feature in lots of books published this season. In MY TWO WORLDS, by Ginger Gordon, with color photos by Martha Cooper (Clarion: $14.95), 8-year-old Kirsy Rodriquez spends Christmas with relatives in the sunny village of Puerta Plata in the Dominican Republic, and explains what it’s like to bridge two very different cultures.

TOO MANY TAMALES (Putnam: $14.95; ages 3-8), written by Gary Soto (“Baseball in April”) and resplendently illustrated with Ed Martinez’ oil paintings, is an amusing and endearing story about the Christmas Eve when four little cousins have to eat six big tamales each--all for a really good cause.

In A CRACK IN THE WALL by Mary Elizabeth Haggerty, illustrated by Ruben de Anda (Lee & Low: $14.95; ages 4-8), a Latino boy creates a beautiful Christmas surprise--using only a cracked plaster wall, crayons and foil gum-wrappers--for his down-on-her-luck mother.

Karla Kuskin (author of “The Dallas Titans Get Ready for Bed”) goes back in time to explain the customs that commemorate Hanukkah in A GREAT MIRACLE HAPPENED HERE (HarperCollins: $15; ages 5-8) ; the illustrations are watercolors by Robert Andrew Parker. THE UNINVITED GUEST and Other Jewish Holiday Tales by Nina Jaffe, illustrated by Elivia (Scholastic: $15.95; ages 8-12) , contains seven read-aloud folk tales about Jewish celebrations, including “Hannah the Joyful” for the Hanukkah selection. Fine explorations of the holiday for younger children are the Jewish Book Award-winning HANUKKAH! (Little, Brown: $5.95 paperback; ages 3-7) by Roni Schotter, with lighthearted illustrations by Marilyn Hafner, and THE STORY OF HANUKKAH: A Lift-the-Flap Rebus Book by Lisa Rojany, illustrated by Holly Jones (Hyperion: $12.95; ages 3-8) , which features what may the first pop-up Maccabees in history.

The magic of words and the glories of reading are celebrated in SOUL LOOKS BACK IN WONDER, illustrated by Tom Feelings (“Jambo Means Hello”), which includes this piece from Maya Angelou’s “I Love the Look of Words”:

When I have stopped reading,

Ideas from the words stay stuck in my mind,

like the sweet smell of butter perfuming my fingers

long after the popcorn is finished.*