The origin of the Wild Forest
It began as a childhood story world
Christine King imagined the Wild Forest before she knew it was a place. There was a girl called Billy, a monkey who would not sit still, and a tiger far too large for the page. Christine imagined and created the Wild Forest story world and its characters when she was young. That early project grew into twelve illustrated books, kept in a box.
Those original pages still exist. They are the reason this project exists too. Nothing here is a redrawing or a reimagining: the artwork you will see in the reader is scanned directly from the original illustrated pages of the early book project, page by page, book by book. Development and illustration work was commissioned while the books were being made, and we are still confirming the full historic credit and rights record before naming anyone.
While the scans are being prepared, every art slot on this site is deliberately left as a designed placeholder. We would rather show you an honest empty frame than a substitute illustration.
The Original Illustrated Pages
Slots reserved for scans of the original illustrated pages from the early book project.
A note on the words
The surviving pictures are original. The wording is not. The twelve digital editions you can read here use newly written editorial story text, fitted page by page to the surviving original illustrated sequence, so the pictures can be enjoyed as complete stories again. It is not presented as Christine's recovered original wording — the original manuscript text for the series has not been recovered or verified. If original manuscripts or titles are recovered later, they can be checked against these digital editions, and Book One's title is already historically verified from the source material.