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.

Every picture in the reader, and every book cover in the collection, comes from those surviving pages. Nothing has been substituted, recoloured or redrawn.