Peter Spier tells the flood almost entirely in pictures, and the pictures are so crowded that a child finds something new in them for years. Penguin Random House files it under wordless picture books and its reading level is Lexile NP, which is the code for a book with no running prose to measure.

You watch the ark go up on its stocks while a caravan of camels brings the cargo in. You watch the animals cross the hills in a procession that runs right off the edge of the page, then file two by two up the ramp. And you watch what happens after, when the vineyard goes in and the world starts again.

What lifts it above every other version is the small business Spier put in the corners. Noah's wife jumps on a crate to get away from the rats. Noah shoos all but two bees out of a hive. The animal babies are born in the spring. The danger and the grandeur of the flood are both in there, and so is the comedy of eight people running a zoo in a storm.

It won the Caldecott Medal in 1978 and has been continuously in print since 1977. Publishers Weekly called it the definitive Noah's Ark. It also took the Christopher Award, a place on the New York Times Best Illustrated list, the IBBY Honour List and the American Book Award.

Hardcover, 48 pages, 9.55 by 8.25 in, illustrated and retold by Peter Spier. Doubleday Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 1977. ISBN-13 9780385094733. Publisher age guidance: 3 to 7 years.