The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle is a high-seas adventure of exploration, shipwreck, derring-do, and of course, talking animals. The animals talk because Doctor Dolittle is no ordinary doctor. He has learned the secret of animal language, and uses his talents to help out his friends in the animal world. Now nine-year-old Tommy Stubbins, the son of a shoemaker, has the opportunity to become Dolittle's assistant, and join him on his journeys. Together with their animal companions they will travel to the strange Spidermonkey Island and beyond, in search of a colleague who has gone missing. The second of Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle series, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle was awarded the prestigious Newbery Medal for children's fiction.

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - There are some of us now reaching middle age who discover themselves to be lamenting the past in one respect if in none other, that there are no books written now for children comparable with those of thirty years ago. I say written FOR children because the new psychological business of writing ABOUT them as though they were small pills or hatched in some especially scientific method is extremely popular today. Writing for children rather than about them is very difficult as everybody who has tried it knows. It can only be done, I am convinced, by somebody having a great deal of the child in his own outlook and sensibilities. Such was the author of "The Little Duke" and "The Dove in the Eagle's Nest," such the author of "A Flatiron for a Farthing," and "The Story of a Short Life." Such, above all, the author of "Alice in Wonderland." Grownups imagine that they can do the trick by adopting baby language and talking down to their very critical audience. There never was a greater mistake. The imagination of the author must be a child's imagination and yet maturely consistent, so that the White Queen in "Alice," for instance, is seen just as a child would see her, but she continues always herself through all her distressing adventures. The supreme touch of the white rabbit pulling on his white gloves as he hastens is again absolutely the child's vision, but the white rabbit as guide and introducer of Alice's adventures belongs to mature grown insight.

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - ALL that I have written so far about Doctor Dolittle I heard long after it happened from those who had known him - indeed a great deal of it took place before I was born. But I now come to set down that part of the great man's life which I myself saw and took part in. Many years ago the Doctor gave me permission to do this. But we were both of us so busy then voyaging around the world, having adventures and filling note-books full of natural history that I never seemed to get time to sit down and write of our doings.

Doctor Dolittle's Post Office (1920) is a children's fantasy novel by Hugh Lofting. The novel is the third in a series of fifteen books featuring Doctor Dolittle, a character created by Lofting in letters written to his wife and children at home while he served in the Great War. Beloved by generations of adults and children for their imaginative nature and moral worldview, Lofting's books have inspired numerous adaptations for theater, film, and television. Doctor John Dolittle is an ordinary physician with an extraordinary gift. Renowned for his ability to communicate with animals, Dolittle has made a name for himself as a traveling veterinarian with a generous heart and a courageous spirit. On the West Coast of Africa, he finds himself enlisted to help rescue the captives on an illegal slave ship, earning him the respect of the people of Fantippo. There, he befriends King Koko, who encourages him to open the small kingdom's first postal service, allowing them to communicate with distant continents using thousands of migratory birds. Told in episodic fashion, and with each episode containing wilder and more wonderful adventures than the next, Lofting's novel features a lost island filled with prehistoric beasts, the invention of an alphabet for animals, and a tortoise who has been alive since before the Great Flood. Doctor Dolittle's Post Office is a delightful work of fantasy for children and adults alike. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle's Post Office is a classic of English children's fiction reimagined for modern readers.