As late as the nineteen-eighties it was possible, if you were in Sawrey in the British Lake District, to run into people who remembered Beatrix Potter, who died in 1943. She was the daughter of a hermetically sealed London barrister's family--an artist in words and colors turning up from some genetic left field--who found in the Lakes the ideal setting for her work, and who purchased some acres of farmland out of the royalties from her early books. As her bank account increased, she spent it on further acreage, and the land went to the National Trust.

In the village she was remembered as quite the local character--tack-sharp about business, a thriving and competitive sheep-breeder, and capable of being a bit of a tartar. She was referred to invariably as Mrs. Heelis; not a single person so much as mentioned Beatrix Potter, the world-famous creator of the Peter Rabbit books, and the reason for all this bookish tourism in town. The books, of course, have survived heartily on their own, all twenty-three of them still in print with much peripheral merchandise and still printed on good paper and decently bound. They are masterpieces of design--"just the right size and weight for their little hands," one of Potter's friends wrote--but Leslie Linder details how much variation and experiment went into these now uniform little volumes.

This is the irreplaceable book for all Potter fanatics and a wonderful thing of its kind, full of detail, information, unpublished stories and drawings and variant versions to show how much care and revision went into not only the pictures but those terse, simple sentences, as pared-down as Hemingway's. There is something richly pleasing about so much exactitude and precision being spent on such stories as The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies or The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck; Linder's book is entirely charming, from Potter's own designs down to the old Kodachrome pictures of the Lakeland settings. Anybody who cares tuppence for Potter should have it and will enjoy it.