There's a homebound joy wanderers can't know, and a glory in the road those who never leave their garden can't fathom. The Wind in the Willows celebrates both. Mole begins a little too attached to his hole, and Mr. Toad is overly addicted to fast machines, but their friendships do what friendships ought—offer balance where there is none.

Kenneth Grahame's talking animal story of rural England began the way all talking animal stories begin, as tales for his son. The novel, however, grows with readers. Children love the Battle of Toad Hall, Ratty's gypsy caravan, Mole's timidity, and Badger's gruffness. Teens like Toad's songs and absurdity. Adults appreciate Toad's (often forgotten) heartfelt change.

All readers can appreciate Grahame's rambling poetic style. We smell the river, hear Mole clattering around his hole, taste Rat's food, see Toad crashing cars, feel Badger's mighty club smacking weasels in the head. You don't have to be an Englishman to appreciate his caricatures of British country types, or to instantly recognize them.

When Ratty and Mole meet the Piper at the Gates of Dawn we realize this isn't simply a bucolic adventure story. Ratty, Mole, Badger and Toad are real people, animals only in name, who can be afraid, comfortable, enraged, silly and curious just as we can. The wanderlust that overcomes Ratty (in "Wayfarers All") isn't just a desire to cover more terrain, it's a mystical urge to expand the soul.

Toad's exploits, by contrast, are mere indulgence—except that even his seemingly swampy soul is cleared, drained and replanted amid all his zaniness. Grahame doesn't beat us with an Aesop-like moral, however; The Wind in the Willows is and shall remain a mature work of literary art fit to delight and instruct for generations to come.

This comparison chart includes a picture from each chapter (when available) of twenty-four editions of Wind in the Willows. Below, with a great deal of help from Carolyn Hares-Stryker's reference The Illustrators of the Wind in the Willows (quotes are from her), we've compiled a list of more than 90 major and minor illustrators who worked on variations of WitW between its first publishing and the current day. Because there are so many, we couldn't include all of them in the chart, and tried to limit the entries to only unabridged hardcover options with at least occasional color illustrations (the illustrators included on the comparison page are cited below in bold). A few abridged editions were too amazing not to include, however!

• 1908, published simultaneously in America by Scribners and Britain by Methuen. The original Methuen edition included a single frontispiece by Graham Robertson, and this was used in the three reprints until 1913. (See an amazing brief video of these earliest editions here!)
• 1913, Paul Bransom illustrated 8th edition (8 total color plates, Scribners and Methuen, later released for the Children's Classics library and Longmeadow Press and currently available in the paperback Seawolf Press collection)
• 1922, Nancy Barnhart (12 illustrations, 8 full-color plates and four pen-and-ink drawings for Scribners) (Barnes & Noble reprint)
• 1927, Wyndham Payne (20 full-page illustrations--woodcuts, linocuts and pen-and-ink colored in yellow for Methuen--a sampling of these are contained in the Annotated Wind in the Willows)
• 1931-33, Ernest Shepard (Scribner originally published only in B&W, republished in the US with 8 color plates in 1953 (59?), repeated for the 75th and 100th anniversary editions--these don't include a Pan illustration; Methuen offered a fully colorized edition—without the plates—in 1971 and 1989; Scribners reprinted the '89 Methuen edition in 1991)
• 1940, Arthur Rackham (Color plates and 12 pen-and-inks used at the beginning of each chapter, published in America by Limited Editions Club and 10 years later by Methuen in the UK. The early edition of this contains an introduction by A.A. Milne, who had also crafted a stage play called Toad of Toad Hall. Heritage Press or Everyman's Library Children's Classics)
• 1946, 47, Paul Henning (in his adaptations Sweet Home and Toad Goes Caravanning, Henning was the first to feature photography illustrations, 15 photographs for each book, both published by Methuen)
• 1949, Disney film Adventures of Ichabod & Mr. Toad featured a lot of work by Milt Kahl
• 1965, Ralph Pinto (four detailed etching illustrations for the first paperback version, published by Avon)
• 1966, Roberta Carter Clark (10 loose pen-and-ink illustrations for Companion Library) **
• 1966, Richard "Dick" Cuffari (Illustrated Junior Library Series 1, Series 2, Series 3, Series 4)
• 1966, Tasha Tudor (the original Collins Edition had 16 watercolors and 102 softly shaded pencil drawings, the Junior Deluxe Edition was later released with just the color illustrations)
• 1967, 1985 Owen Wood (?? intricate pen and ink drawings first commissioned in France for Gallimard Edition's Le Vent dans les Saules, translated by Jacques Parsons, this was later published in England by Badger Books)
• 1968, David K. Stone (seven acrylics and nine charcoal drawings, highlighted with green or yellow wash for Golden Press)
• 1969, Robert J. Lee (12 pencil drawings in the Dell paperback)
• 1969, Alex Tsao ** (New American Library paperback, this version was the first to include a scholarly introduction to the story as well as a research bibliography)
• 1976, Dominique Michele Strandquest (Dover WitW Coloring Book)
• 1977, Adrienne Adams (18 watercolor illustrations in The Riverbank from the Wind in the Willows, an adaptation published by Scribners)
• 1979, 1980, 1982, Beverly Gooding (three small books published by Methuen parcelling out stories from WitW: The Open Road, Wayfarers All, and Mole's Christmas, or Home Sweet Home.)
• 1980, Michael Hague (Holt, Rinehart & Winston)
• 1982, Mary Alice Baer (a four volume set, adapted by Janet Palazzo-Craig and published by Troll: The Adventures of Mole, Rat, and Toad; Adventures in the Wild Wood; More Adventures with Mr. Toad; and The Battle at Toad Hall)
• 1982, Leslie Morrill (38 line drawings in the Bantam paperback, with an academic introduction by Robert Sale)
• 1982, John Worsley (Lemon Tree Press missing Wayfarers All chapter)
• 1983, Cosgrove Hall (Brian Cosgrove and Mark Hall produced two stop-motion films Wind in the Willows—which inspired a 52-episode TV series—and A Tale of Two Toads—followed by 13 episodes of )
• 1983, Martin Aithison (36 humorous and colorful caricature drawings for Ladybird's adaptation)
• 1983, Tessa Barwick (26 b/w "fairly unsentimental and meticulously detailed" illustrations, in the Heinemann edition) 
• 1983, Val Biro (this abridged version published by Marks and Spencer features fifty humorous pen and watercolor illustrations) 
• 1983, John Burningham (Viking Kestrel)
• 1983, Babette Cole (the first WitW pop-up book with 12 pages, published by Methuen)
• 1983, Harry Hargreaves (includes 110 pen & india ink illustrations, and Hargreaves also writes the introduction in this edition published by Armada)
• 1983, Philip Mendoza (watercolor illustrations gathered from earlier Playhour cartoon strips and compiled in the edition abridged by Barbara Sleigh and published by Hodder & Stoughton)
• 1983, Pixie O'Harris (107 illustrations in the Rigby edition)
• 1983, Steve Smallman (26 b/w line drawings in the Scholastic paperback)
• 1984, Johnathan Langley ** (20 b/w, 15 watercolor illustrations for the Octopus edition)
• 1985, Eileen Fitzpatrick Berry (four small picture books published by Exeter Books, featuring 12-17 illustrations each: The River Bank; The Open Road; Home Sweet Home; and The Battle for Toad Hall)
• 1985, Rene Cloke ** (100+ pen & ink/watercolor illustrations for Award Publications—later Crescent Books—adapted by Michael Bishop)
• 1985, Lulu Delacre (vibrant, full-page watercolor illustrations for the Little Simon picture book edition)
• 1985, Ronald Embleton (large format paintings for the edition published by Dean)
• 1985, Margaret Gordon (71 "endearing" b/w illustrations in Tales from The Wind in the Willows, from Puffin Books)
• 1986, Douglas Hall (16 full-page watercolors, outlined and detailed with color inks, and accompanied by 12 line drawings by Francis Mosely, publsihed by Kaleidoscope)
• 1989, Eric Kincaid (Kincaid created over 260(!) meticulous illustrations, first drawing the illustrations in color pencil, then overlaying with watercolor. Unfortunately, the original Brimax) version is abridged, missing the Piper and Wayfarer chapters. Later, Brimax released some of his illustrations in the four picture book retellings by June Woodman.) 
• 1987, Peter Barrett (Known for his work on James Herriott's Treasury for Children, Barrett reveals Edwardian England through the eyes of a skilled naturalist. 12 delicate pencil drawings and eight "exquisitely detailed, softly colored watercolors" from Golden Book)
• 1987, Kim Lane (25 sparsely detailed, muted watercolors for the adaptation by Clive Hopwood, from World International Publishing)
• 1988, Francis Phillips (64 gouache illustrations were originally published in 1979 in an anthology called Story-Teller 2, 9780706238013. Nearly a decade later, Exeter Books published an abbreviated and modernized edition, in which Phillips' illustrations suffer from being overcrowded and drastically reduced in size 9780671101633).
• 1988, Kate Simpson (21 watercolors for a 30 page abridgment by John Broadhead from Carnival)
• 1988, Arthur Suydam (Sample picture Known for contributing to many comics including Batman, Tarzan, Predator, and Alien, WitW was a labor of love for Suydam, and he did the cover art, five gouache watercolors, and 48 ink drawings--one of which is a clear homage to Rackham--for Contemporary Books)
• 1988, Justin Todd ** (A student of Ardizzzone, Todd's WitW includes 21 full-page paintings, "done in painstaking detail and highly finished with reflective qualities of light, use viewpoint, depth and scale to achieve humor, imagination and movement." Originally published by Victor Gollancz (9780575038929), republished in Dover's Calla editions in 2013)
• 1989, Nick Harris (16 muted, full-color plates and 20 delicate b/w ink drawings for Octopus)
• 1989, Susan Wheeler (Nine full page pen and ink drawings for the abridged edition by Grosset & Dunlap. These focus on the cozier aspects of the story, less on the adventures.)
• 1990, Ken McKie (cartoony watercolor illustrations complement his wife Anne's simplified retellings in the five volume set published by Grandreams--WitW: The River Bank, WitW: The Open Road, WitW: The Wild Wood, WitW: The Adventures of Mr. Toad, and WitW: The Battle for Toad Hall)
• 1991, Graham Percy (26 muted color plates and eight small b/w drawings from Pavillion)
• 1992, Martin Baynton (71 "sweetly humorous" pen and ink drawings for the inexpensive paperback from Walker Books)
• 1993, Paul Cox (12 watercolor over ink and 25 thumbnail drawings for Readers Digest)
• 1993, Don Daily (retold for children, Daily's whimsical, zany version features 40, often "oversized, exuberantly colored pictures." Working on WitW changed Daily's life, and he went on to illustrate several other books for Courage Books.)
• 1993, Lindsay Duff (Tiger Books)
• 1993, Holly Hannon (McClanahan Book Company)
• 1993, Laura Lydecker (Troll Associates)
• 1994, Patrick Benson (St. Martin's Press; he also illustrated the four sequels by William Horwood (in order): Willows in Winter, Toad Triumphant, Willows and Beyond, Willows at Christmas)
• 1994, Robin Lawrie (Puffin Books)
• 1994, Lorna Tomei (Baronet Books)
• 1994, Cliff Wright (Ladybird Books)
• 1995, Thea Kliros (Dover Children's Thrift)
• 1995, James Lynch (Folio #1)
• 1995, Jan McCafferty (Oxford University Press)
• 1995, John Patience (Peter Haddock Publishing)
• 1995, Graham Philpot (Kingfisher)
• 1996, Inga Moore (abridged, Candlewick, hardcover or softcover) (2000, Walker Books?)
• 1997, TVC Animation Studio
• 1997, Gill Guile (Brimax)
• 1997-2008, Michel Plessix, multiple graphic novels (Guy Delcourt)
• 1998, Maggie Downer (Parragon Publishing)
• 2000, Eric Copeland (Dorling Kindersley)
• 2000, Kathy Ember (Leapfrog)
• 2000, Patricia Ludlow (Brown Watson) 
• 2000, Joanne Moss (Breslich & Foss)
• 2000, Helen Ward (Borders Press)
• 2001, Michael Foreman (Harcourt)
• 2002, Mary Jane Begin (SeaStar)
• 2003, Jeff Fisher (Reader's Digest Young Families)
• 2003, Nick Price (Dalmation Press)
• 2004, Ann Iosa (Barnes & Noble)
• 2004, Tim Davis (Modern Publishing)
• 2004, Sibylle Delacroix (Paperview)
• 2004, Anna Leplar (Parragon Publishing)
• 2004, Hal Taylor (Townsend Press)
• 2005, Scott McKowen (Sterling)
• 2005, Charles van Sandwyk (Folio #2: 35 hand-colored etchings, some with watercolor backgrounds, and 55 b/w etchings)
• 2006, Jamel Akib (10 loosely sketched and shaded pencil drawings for Sterling Press)
• 2007, Mauro Evangelista (70 "vivacious and distinctive" illustrations--very child friendly--Usborne)
• 2007, Robert Ingpen (130+ illustrations originally for the Palazzo Centennial edition, now available through Sterling)
• 2012, Ross MacDonald **
• 2012, David Roberts (slightly abridged) **
• 2017, Sebastian Meschemmoser (NorthSouth)
• 2017, David Petersen
• 2022, Chris Dunn (coming soon!)

** haven't seen these--would love to get a peek at sample illustrations!