Our Mission

Photos: John Doe and Kimberly Stringbean

Photos: John Doe and Kimberly Stringbean

Enchanted Lion Books is an independent publishing company based in Brooklyn, NY. We opened our doors and published our first list in spring, 2003. We love books, well-told stories, and illustrations that open up the visual world and deepen a child's sense of story.


We select the books that we publish with great care. We seek out those that we believe children will enjoy and that reflect an individual voice or vision. We live with the books we publish long before they go to press, and we share them within our communities. We also sleep with many books under our pillows, and we publish the ones that invade our dreams. We believe in the books we publish because they are beautiful and lively, thoughtful and full of feeling. They evince a fierce belief in the imagination, exploring the inner world as richly as the world around us. Our books explore the feelings and imaginative lives of various animal and human characters, but they also travel out into northwest Pakistan, China during the Cultural Revolution and the Levantine world during the golden age of Arab science. We have published books from authors and illustrators in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Finland, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Japan, Switzerland and the US.

As we all know, books help children to cross all kinds of boundaries and borders long before they begin to grasp the world through actual travel and experience. We thus take as our task that of connecting young readers to the wonderfully diverse modes of expression that exist in the world, so that in the end they will feel that the whole world—with all of its wonderful, surprising and very real similarities and differences—is their home.