There's a notice outside Jane Nissen's 18th-century riverside home in west London: Please shut the gate. High tide today. Flooding. Sure enough, quite soon, the whole road is submerged and ducks swim merrily among the marooned cars. Immediately (if you're not in a hurry) there's a sense of adventure: the water lapping round the gateposts recalls the opening chapter of The Children of Green Knowe. And, inside, the clock in the cool stone-flagged hall makes me think of Tom's Midnight Garden.
Appropriate really, for, as Jane Nissen tells me, she's always been obsessed with children's books: they've been part of her life at every stage: as a "very bookish" child in America, as a mother (she married an Englishman and has four children) as a grandmother, and, of course, as a publisher with a long and distinguished career in children's books. She started off at Puffin. "Kaye Webb was a neighbour. She had acquired a boat and she knocked on the door one day, in the sixties, to ask if she could park it in our front garden, on the river. I said yes, if you'll take me on as a reader..."
Thirty years on, in 1998, when Jane retired from Hamish Hamilton, she had no intention of putting her feet up. With seemingly boundless energy, and in addition to the work she still does as a consultant and editor, she has set up her own imprint to revive a personal selection of books that are out of print but which, she believes, have a lot to offer today's children.
It's an enterprise well in tune with the times - the turn of the century has prompted many publishers to examine their backlists and even, as Fiona Kenshole at OUP tells me, to ransack their own bookshelves for ideas. "Classic is the new buzzword," she says and, across the board, dozens of modern classics have been given a new look. Ann Jungman's new imprint, Barn Owl Books, is bringing back relatively recent books that have gone out of print, and, increasingly, in new fiction there's a return to longer, literary books.
"I feel that quality is coming back into fashion," says Jane Nissen - "of course, we've always had a huge number of wonderful writers but, for too long, they've been up against a rising tide of, well, less 'challenging' books. And, while I'd certainly never condemn all those 'series' books - because they undoubtedly get children reading - I do think that there has been a radical change.
"Yes, certainly JK Rowling has made a huge difference, and another important factor was Philip Pullman's rousing acceptance speech when he won the Carnegie medal in 1996 with Northern Lights - and we should thank David Fickling at Scholastic for daring to publish that trilogy - which, in spite of its length and complexity, has proved that children can cope with long, demanding books. It allowed the doors to swing open, and it's clear that there's a hunger for longer, all-engrossing books by writers of real substance. And that's why I feel that it's now possible to bring back classics from the 1940s, and even earlier, which still have a lot to say. Of course there's an element of risk, but publishing's a risky business."
Nissen works from home, with a huge desk at the kitchen window. The four titles in the first batch of Jane Nissen Books are laid out on the kitchen table like freshly baked cakes - alongside their well-thumbed original editions. Apart from Alison Uttley's enchanting autobiographical book The Country Child (1931), with its beautiful Tunnicliffe illustrations, the books are all from the forties, and give intriguing insight into the preoccupations and curious freedom of children in that pre-TV world.
A feature - almost a prerequisite - of children's fiction of this period is the absence of parents; they're either dead, at war or away on long voyages. Their place is taken by governesses, maiden aunts and hopeless clergymen whose fate it is to be repeatedly out-witted by their charges.
Brendon Chase by BB (aka Denys Watkins Pitchford) is about two brothers whose parents are away in India. Scorning their aunt, they run away from home to live wild in the forest. Inspired by Robin Hood, and equipped not just with the knives that in those days were part of every boy's personal armoury, but also a rifle stolen from the gardener, the boys shoot birds, rabbits, a deer, a badger and a pig. With a ruthless efficiency that their fictional contemporaries, William Brown and his Outlaws, would have given their eye teeth for, the boys cook and eat their prey and make crude garments from the skins.
How attitudes have changed! In these days of gentle TV animal rescue programmes and ongoing concern over fox-hunting, it's hard to imagine a more challenging subject. As Philip Pullman writes in his enthusiastic introduction: "This is the sort of book that will never be written again..." And that's why it is such a bold, intriguing choice. The boys respond to their surroundings with a primeval survival instinct and BB (who also did the illustrations) magically combines a lyrical appreciation of the natural world with a practical, unsentimental understanding of it.
Interestingly, Jane Nissen read this very English book as an 11-year-old in America. "I was given it when I was sent away on my own to a ranch in Wyoming, to recover from an illness. I was thrilled by the idea of these boys surviving in the wild, it made a deep impression on me."
Another book she grew up with was Mistress Masham's Repose by TH White (though, again, very English, it was first published in the US). Full of classical/literary allusions, it's a fantasy about 10-year-old Maria, who discovers a community of Lilliputians in the grounds of her family estate. As Anne Fine says in her introduction, this was her "perfect" book. "It has everything I could have wanted: a resourceful orphan heiress, a hidden will, a sneaky, grasping vicar, a spiteful kitten-drowning governess, dangers and chases, imprisonments and revelations."
The funniest of these books is The Wind On The Moon by Eric Linklater - a wildly eccentric adventure of two sisters who set out on a complicated mission to rescue their father from prison in an enemy country. With a motley crew of characters, including not only the obligatory governess but also a splendid dancing master, this is a gloriously unpredictable tale of escalating bad behaviour, magical transformations, slapstick humour, sophisticated satire and, throughout, a war-time preoccupation with food, involving irresistibly detailed lists. With his customary wit and calligraphic elegance, Nicholas Bentley drew the pictures.
Offering adventure, fantasy, humour and romance, this is an inspired, unusual collection of books, with wide appeal (from around eight to adult) that goes way beyond the obvious lure of nostalgia, and Nissen talks about them with a protective passion. Hunting them down, and coaxing them out of retirement, has been hard work.
"I've learned a lot of things I didn't know before, about design, production and the actual physical making of the book." Wisely, she wanted neither newly commissioned artwork nor fusty facsimiles for the covers - instead, the designer, using modern technology, has created bold, beautifully coloured jackets from the original black and white illustrations. "I love the fact that we've been able to make something new from something old; and to see these books in the bookshop, ready for a whole new generation of readers is, I think, to see the future holding hands with the past."
• Mistress Masham's Repose by T H White, illustrated by Fritz Eichenburg; Brendon Chase by BB, illustrated by Denys Watkins-Pitchford; The Wind On The Moon by Eric Linklater, illustrated by Nicholas Bentley; The Country Child by Alison Uttley, illustrated by CF Tunnicliffe. All published by Jane Nissen Books at £5.99.
