The first sentence does all the work and asks for nothing: once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. No weather, no throat-clearing, just the four names in a row like coats on hooks. Geoffrey Bles put it out in 1950 with a modest first printing — nobody was expecting seven books — and Pauline Baynes drew it, which is half of why people remember the faces they remember.
I have two copies behind the counter. One is clean and will sell to a collector. The other has been read until the spine gave up; somebody's crayon in the margin by the lamp-post, a name in pencil inside the board, tape where tape should never go. That one I keep pricing low and then not selling, which my accountant would call a system.
Baynes was in her twenties when she did those headpieces, and she drew the map too — Narnia with its hills and its little pictures, which is how most of us learned the geography before we read it. Pen line, nothing fussy. The crayon by the lamp-post is somebody annotating the same map, really.
Jun, the wardrobe is the whole problem on stage. The RSC did it big in the eighties, and every small company since has had to solve it with a door frame, a row of hanging coats and a light change — audience does the rest, and children never once ask where the back of the box went.