In a stack room on the fourth floor of a library on College Street, there is a clay tablet. It is roughly four thousand years old. Someone in Mesopotamia pressed cuneiform into it sometime around 2000 BCE, and now it lives at 239 College Street in downtown Toronto, in a collection mostly known for nineteenth-century English picture books. The tablet is the oldest item in the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books. It is also, depending on how you count, one of the oldest pieces of writing intended for or about a child anywhere in the world.
Most Torontonians have never heard of the Osborne Collection. That is a quiet shame, because Toronto Public Library holds one of the most important assemblages of historical children's literature in the English-speaking world, with more than 90,000 items spanning from cuneiform to the early twentieth century. And the only reason it is here, instead of in London or Oxford or Boston, is that an English librarian visited the city in 1934 and was charmed by what he saw.
The 1934 visit
Edgar Osborne was the County Librarian for Derbyshire, in central England. He came to Canada in 1934 as a delegate of the Library Association of Great Britain. His wife Mabel came with him. They had a long-standing private collection of historical English children's books, the kind of thing two genteel readers in interwar Britain might have accumulated over a lifetime, and they were touring libraries on the trip with no particular plan to give the collection away.
Then they walked into Boys and Girls House, Toronto Public Library's dedicated children's branch, and met Lillian H. Smith.
Smith had founded the children's department at Toronto Public Library in 1912. By the time the Osbornes met her, she was already the most established children's librarian in the British Empire and, technically, the first: she was the first professionally trained children's librarian anywhere in the Empire, having trained under Anne Carroll Moore at the New York Public Library before coming to Toronto. Her ideas about what children deserved from a library, real reading rooms with trained staff, careful curation, and books treated like books rather than disposable objects, had quietly turned Toronto into a model for other cities. The Osbornes were impressed enough to remember.
The 1949 gift
Mabel Osborne died in 1949. In her memory, Edgar wrote to Toronto Public Library and asked whether they would take the books, about two thousand volumes, as a tribute to Lillian Smith and the work she had built. The library said yes.
The Osborne Collection officially opened that year with that initial gift. It has been growing for almost eighty years since. Today it holds more than 90,000 items: chapbooks, harlequinades, movable books, miniatures, hornbooks, primers, fairy-tale anthologies, original artwork, manuscripts, ephemera, and a few pieces (like the cuneiform tablet) that predate children's literature as a category by several thousand years.
What is actually in there
The collection's spine is English-language children's literature published before 1910, which, if you care about picture books, is essentially the period during which the picture book as we know it was invented. You can hold a copy of Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658), often credited as the first picture book ever printed. You can flip through Walter Crane's nineteenth-century toy books, the cheap brightly chromolithographed picture books that briefly made him the most famous illustrator in Britain. You can read fairy tales annotated by hand by their first owners, eight-year-olds in 1872 who underlined their favorite witches.
Lillian Smith's personal collection, focused on twentieth-century children's books with a particular eye for Canadian titles, was added to the library in 1962 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of children's services in Toronto. The Smith collection sits alongside the Osborne books on the same floor. Together the two collections function as a single research holding.
It is open to the public. You do not need an appointment for short visits. The reference librarians are extraordinary: ask one of them about Beatrix Potter, or about Lewis Carroll, and they will pull things out for you that you did not know existed.
Why this matters for anyone who cares about picture books
Toronto is not an obvious capital of children's literature. Saying it out loud feels like overreaching. New York has Maurice Sendak. London has Beatrix Potter and the V&A. Boston has the Eric Carle Museum.
But it turns out that in matters of preservation, of scholarship, of taking children's books seriously as artifacts and as a tradition, Toronto has had something the others did not for almost a century: a serious public collection, in a public library, free for any curious reader to walk in and use. That is the work of two librarians, Smith and Osborne, who made decisions in the first half of the twentieth century that turned out to be more consequential than they could have known.
For a working picture-book maker in this city, the Osborne is also a kind of quiet inheritance. Walter Crane's 1875 layout decisions are still influencing how spreads are designed in 2026. The first picture books to use a wordless double-page spread are in the building. Beatrix Potter's early notebooks are in the building. If you make picture books in Toronto, the technical history of your craft is sitting on the fourth floor of 239 College Street, free to consult.
How to visit
The Osborne Collection is on the fourth floor of the Lillian H. Smith Branch, 239 College Street, just east of Spadina. Hours are Monday through Friday 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., Saturday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday noon to 5 p.m. Admission is free. There is no charge to handle most of the materials, although the rarest items must be requested in advance. The Friends of the Osborne Collection runs occasional public lectures and exhibits worth subscribing to if you live nearby.
If you have small children with you, plan to come back without them. The reading rooms are quiet and the books are not for casual browsing. The library does, however, have one of the best-curated open-stack picture-book collections in the country on the lower floors. You can do both visits in one afternoon.
A last thought
The Osborne gift was an act between two adults who loved old books and one librarian who had built a place worthy of them. Lillian Smith retired in 1952 and died in 1983. Both got to see the collection grow. Neither lived to see its current size. It is, in some sense, the most successful retirement project in Canadian library history.
If you make picture books in Toronto, you are working in a city that decided eighty years ago that children's books were worth keeping forever. That is a strange and lovely thing to inherit.