Our first books were magical. They weren’t like windows you could see through; they were closed like doors. Their covers were gaudy and promised surprise but they never really gave away what lay hidden inside. If the book was new, we heard the little creak of the spine, itself like the stiff hinges of a door, when we opened it. And with each new book, we stepped into a space where anything might happen, and often did. Every page seemed a strange room in an unknown house whose least corner we explored. No matter how many times we turned those pages, the fascination remained. That was part of their magic. But those first books were magical, too, because they were ours. They weren’t the heavy tomes — heavy with text, and without pictures — that grown-ups liked. When they were read aloud to us, we knew that their words and their illustrations were meant for us alone.

In “Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter” (University of Chicago Press, 352 pages, $30), Seth Lerer notes that the history of children’s books is a study “of books as valued things, crafted and held, lived with and loved.” This fundamental insight gives a human touch to what might otherwise have been a dusty foray into long forgotten hornbooks and primers. But Mr. Lerer, a philologist by training — and professor of English at Stanford — loves words, as well as the books made from them, and he is an impassioned reader. Whether he’s discussing the grim “New England Primer” of 1727 or the decisive impact of Darwinism on late-19th-century children’s fiction, he has a keen sense of what he nicely calls “the pocket-worlds of childhood.”

The phrase refers to 18th-century “pocket-books,” such as Thomas Bridges’s “Adventures of a Bank-Note” or “The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes,” published in 1765 by the influential John Newbery (after whom the Newbery Medal for the best children’s book of the year is named). The appeal of these diminutive volumes lay as much in their size as in their stories. The books, like children themselves, were small things in a big world; like the traveling banknote of the story, they too were “ciphers to be passed along, from parents’ pockets into hostile worlds.” As Mr. Lerer says, “the adventures of the child go on in secret spaces: in the purses, pockets, tills, and palms of life.” The most successful children’s books are those which capture something of that childhood sense of secrecy.

The figure who looms largest in the history of children’s literature is the legendary Aesop. The Greeks and the Romans doted on their children and had them memorize long passages of Homer and Virgil; from the epic writers children not only learned good grammar and diction but oratory and declamation. As Mr. Lerer notes, the word “infant” comes from the Latin infans, a being without speech. To learn to speak, and to speak well, was to become fully human.

Aesop wasn’t as grand as Homer but his fables were ideally suited to appeal to young minds. He had been a slave; not only that, he was grotesquely ugly: “potbellied, misshapen of head, snub-nosed, swarthy, dwarfish, bandy-legged, short-armed, squint-eyed, liver-lipped,” in one description Mr. Lerer cites — in short, the sort of genial troll children instinctively respond to. Aesop understood powerlessness, the central predicament of childhood; his tales all deal with matters of “power and control.” A Greek boy might emulate Achilles, but from Aesop he could learn that “cunning was better than strong.”

Over the ages Aesop underwent various transformations. The Roman poet Phaedrus (a freed slave himself) set his fables to verse. In late antiquity and the Middle Ages, he was Christianized. In the 18th century, John Locke conscripted him for the Enlightenment. His fables were among the first books printed after the invention of movable type, and invariably accompanied by edifying illustrations — that essential feature of children’s literature from the beginning. In a sense, Mr. Lerer’s book is a history of those Aesopian permutations though it is much more as well: There is hardly a children’s classic, from “Robinson Crusoe” to “Where the Wild Things Are” to pop-up books, which he does not discuss with sympathy and wit. There are omissions; for some odd reason, he fails even to mention the “Fables” of LaFontaine, easily the crowning glory of the Aesopian tradition.

Those who think of children’s literature as sweet and soppy are in for a rude surprise. These books prepared children for harsh truths. Mr. Lerer quotes Cotton Mather, who in 1711 warned his young readers, “Yea, you may be at play one hour; dead, dead, the next.” The “New England Primer” of 1727 was as much “a book of death” as a guide to righteous living.

The Puritans also figure in Leonard S. Marcus’s meticulously documented (and beautifully written) “Minders of Make-Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature” (Houghton Mifflin, 413 pages, $28). While Mr. Lerer provides a comprehensive overview, Mr. Marcus focuses on America; he’s less interested in the books than in the authors, editors, and publishers who produced and controlled — and sometimes squelched — them. He’s especially good on describing the conflicted role which librarians, zealous to protect children from “bad books,” played in this surprisingly rough-and-tumble saga. Thus, the formidably influential Anne Carroll Moore of the New York Public Library could not only sniff at her erstwhile friend E. B. White’s immortal “Stuart Little” but, a few years later, dismiss “Charlotte’s Web” as “a mongrel work” and discourage its publication.

Mr. Marcus, a leading authority on the history of children’s literature, knows where all the bodies are buried; he leaves no editorial backstabbing or authorial machination unrecorded in this strangely gripping inside story. It’s a story characterized by what he terms the sheer “ferocity” of competing interests. As both Mr. Lerer and Mr. Marcus show, children’s literature has always inspired fierce passions. To shape the minds of the young through books is to exercise power over the future. Aesop would not have been surprised.

eormsby@nysun.com