The translator takes centre stage in this review of selected examples of historical and contemporary prefaces to translated children's books published in the UK. Viewed historically, translators' prefaces offer rare insights into the selection of texts for translation, developments in translation practices and changes in the image of the child reader. Mary Wollstonecraft, radical author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, addresses adults in the 'advertisement' to her 1790 translation of Christian Gotthilf Salzmann' Elements of Morality for the Use of Children; she expresses a didactic, moral purpose that necessitates wholesale cultural context adaptation. Over half a century later, the emphasis is on entertainment in the fey little poem To English Children written by Mary Howitt to mediate her translation of Otto Speckter's fables (1844). In more recent times, prolific children's authors Joan Aiken uses the art of the storyteller to beguile her young reader into understanding cultural difference in the lengthy introduction to her translation of the Comtesse de Ségur's L'Auberge de l'Ange-Gardien (1976), whereas the preface to Ann Lawson Lucas's admirable, scholarly retranslation of Collodi's Pinocchio (1996) reveals the dilemma inherent in a translation of a children's classic by an academic. When the translator becomes visible, metatextual comment highlights the particular demands of translating for children.