Rip Van Winkle

Washington Irving borrowed the story. He was living in England in 1,819, homesick and reading German folk tales, when he came across Peter Klaus the Goatherd, who falls asleep after meeting some strange men in the mountains and wakes twenty years later. Irving moved him to the Catskills and made him Dutch, and he never pretended otherwise: he appended a note to the story saying where it came from.

What he added was the part that made it American. Rip sleeps through the Revolution. He walks down into his own village to find the king's portrait repainted as George Washington, his neighbours arguing about an election, and himself a citizen of a country that did not exist when he lay down.

The 1905 edition is where the golden age of illustrated books begins. Arthur Rackham's colour plates for it, tipped in by hand on heavy art paper, made it the first gift book to sell in real quantity, and every publisher in London spent the next ten years copying the format until the war took the paper away.