The story of Captain Slaughterboard and his motley crew aboard The Black Tiger is a real swashbuckling yarn full of rum, tobacco, sharpened steel, bad ink and finding your inner peace… which is nice, really. Peake has created some fearsome pirates and illustrated each with such wit and detail that you can almost smell them from the pages. The pen and ink drawings are elaborate with barnacle-encrusted flourishes and are complemented well by the hand-lettered narrative that is oh so droll. The perfect book for the little pirate.

I love Seibold’s books (it was his Penguin Dreams that first started my interest in children’s books) and this book is no disappointment. The illustrations are a fantastical merger of Seibold’s signature computer-drawn graphics with a rococo flair, all laid on spray-painted backgrounds in a Technicolor palette. And the cover has glitter! Sound too much? Noooo. Never. Not when paired with an absurd re-jig of old classic rhymes (which, let’s be honest, weren’t so solid anyway — “Hey diddle diddle the cow jumped over the moon”?). The result is gelastic, an hysterical pairing of illustration and verse. The perfect book for giggles and nonsense.

A gripping, cautionary tale set in the ruthless badlands of the domestic fish tank, Ugly Fish pulls no punches, there is no fairy-tale ending for these fish… But there is a humorous little story with some great characters and a wonderfully satisfying moral to wrap it all up. The illustrations are delightfully ugly; drawn in pen and ink then digitally coloured, presented on a matte stock. The perfect book for the little bully.

Edward Gorey was one of the most talented (and eccentric) graphic artists to emerge in post-war America, and this macabre little book is one of his finest. An A to Z of children’s names, complete with illustrations of their final moments, all narrated in rhyming dactylic couplets. The deadpan delivery gives it the feeling of a public record, and the fine cross-hatched illustrations point to the Victorian fascination with death and childhood innocence. The perfect book for anyone who ever painted their fingernails black.

A charming, heart-warming story about … death. Death in a dressing gown and slippers. And about Duck, who makes friends with this strange character, Death. The charm of the story comes from the simple pencil drawings of its awkward characters, and their honest, unhurried words. The ultimate passing of Duck is so unremarkable as to bring perspective to the business of death. A wonderful, reassuring perspective that we often lose sight of in the face of loss. “But that is life, thought Death.” The perfect book for talking about death.

This is the kind of book that your children learn off by heart, and surprise you by “reading” back to you. An encyclopaedic list of the narrator’s favourite dogs and their doggy traits, cleanly illustrated in pencil and watercolor. The simple, repetitive text quickly captures a child’s attention and the pages come alive with the bounding energy of their canine characters. The perfect book for the dog lover.

I hesitated when my daughter first chose this book from the bookcase, I just assumed the block illustrations would be too abstract for a three-year-old, and with no obvious story to capture her attention that she would soon be frustrated and turn away. I learnt a little about pre-schoolers that day — they love the abstract, they love to find patterns and familiar shapes, they love to count, and they love you to make up little stories about unseen characters traveling to unseen places. Follow the Line is a beautiful book with stylish illustrations that reveal Ljungkvist’s Swedish heritage. The perfect book for the junior explorer.

Fox is a modern fable that pulls no punches. It tells a tale of friendship and betrayal so openly and rawly that it takes your breath away — especially in the context of a picture book. The rich, burnt colours and scratchy textures feel dusty and sun-parched, evocative of the Australian landscape. Hand-drawn lettering, etched awkwardly with the illustrator’s left hand, brings an additional layer of naïvety to the text. The tale of Fox, Dog and Magpie is unexpected from a picture book, and certainly not a story for juniors, but any child who has spent hard time in the school playground will take some meaning from the telling. The perfect book for the easily misled.

This quirky tale about an avian pre-natal coffee group has a surprise ending that will make any veteran/survivor of such groups laugh. The illustrations are softly drawn, the characters expressive and lively. Several cut pages midway through create layers of illustrations that tell the story incrementally, comic style, building a nice sense of tension for that snappy ending. The perfect book for the ugly duckling.