Happily ever after

THE placid ogres and weird, naked children of Maxfield Parrish, W.W. Denslow’s denizens of Oz, the pale princesses and vaporous nixies of the brothers Grimm -- these are images we carry with us happily ever after. Betsy Beinecke Shirley began collecting children’s books three decades before her death and donating them to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale. In “Drawn to Enchant” (Yale University Press: 224 pp., $45), edited by Timothy Young, the library presents 250 samples of original artwork from her collection. Among the artists represented are Parrish, Denslow, N.C. Wyeth, Maurice Sendak, Ludwig Bemelmans and Jessie Willcox Smith, who illustrated George MacDonald’s 1919 classic, “At the Back of the North Wind.” The North Wind was a person -- a nocturnal sort, with very long black hair you could grab ahold of. When things got rough in the real world, she would fly with you, out the bedroom window, into the moonlight.

-- Sara Lippincott