Thomas the Tank Engine by W. Awdry (1997, Hardcover, Reprint)

My son is a huge Thomas fan, and had be read him "Thomas the Tank Engine's Big Blue Treasury" every night for weeks. Hoping to get some variety, I got this giant book of all the Thomas stories written by W. Awdry (the Big Blue Treasury has 3 stories written by his son, Christopher Awdry). Compared to the son's stories, these are often violent and not really appropriate for some small children. The theme of at least half the stories is that a train is either rude or vain and then gets his punishment (either from an event, or from the teasing or revenge of the other characters). My wife won't read the stories, and I find myself doing some verbal editing of the stories whenever I see the very common story element of the other trains/trucks/coaches deciding to "pay him out" (i.e. paybacks, revenge - a phrase which seems to pop up in about a third of the stories). A couple of stories have rude trucks, which are then destroyed. If your kids watch a lot of the videos, however, you should be familar with many of the stories, as they are the basis for a lot of the videos. The book has good value in that there is a LOT of stories (I got that variety I was looking for), however to make them fit they have reduced the illustrations to a VERY small size that I find too small to do the stories justice. Also, the stories cover several decades, and I felt there was a decline in the quality of the stories as the book comes to an end. I would rather have this one than trying to collect all the individual books, however. In short, I don't think this is as good as either the Big Blue Treasury or the Big Yellow Treasury, both of which have stories better suited to small children and much bigger and brighter illustrations, and my son likes both of those books better also. This is still a good book for a Thomas fan, however, and a nice change after you have read those books a hundred times (and even if you decide to skip a few of the darker stories, it is still a good value) and it tracks many of the stories in the videos.