When I was 8 years old, I was given a book called “Giants.” Published in 1976, it was an art book filled with spectacular drawings and paintings of giants throughout literature and mythology. Three artists were credited — Julek Heller, Carolyn Scrace and Juan Wijngaard — and the accompanying text, by Sarah Teale, was pseudoscientific, treating the existence of giants as fact and the analysis of their culture and customs as a legitimate branch of anthropology. I studied it like scripture, and knew its pages better than those of any other book I owned.

I studied the pictures at least. For me, the point was the pictures, and the enchantment they conjured was total. With gorgeous draftsmanship, the artists portrayed Norse gods, medieval giants, Cyclopes and trolls, Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan.

These giants emerged from mountains — they were mountains — and dallied with knights, but there was a melancholy about them. Giants, Teale wrote, “were often rather pensive beings who could spend hours pondering a seemingly insoluble problem such as their age, the reason for their large size, the origins of light and darkness (a source of fear for most giants).” Almost always the giants were alone. In the world below, there were bustling human towns and cozy human homes, while the giants, far fewer in number, walked the earth lonely and hungry — and, given the difficulty of finding stylish clothes in their size, probably very cold, too.

GIANT ON THE SHORE (Transit Children’s Editions, 32 pp., $19.95, ages 3 and up) — with text by Alfonso Ochoa, translated from the Spanish by Shook, and art by Andrés López — perfectly captures the ennui specific to the enormous. The story begins with the arrival of a giant to an unnamed island. He emerges from the ocean, towers over a cluster of boats in the harbor, approaches the beach and stops, unsure whether to come ashore. His shadow darkens a charming, densely populated city that “smells like bread,” where “you can hear the movie theater over the bustle of the cars.” But he’s still not convinced.

Ochoa’s narrator is a storyteller eager to celebrate the giant in prose and verse: “If the giant decided to come ashore/I could write a story/where the people welcome him the way they do the first rain,/with long poems and tiny bonfires./Very tiny bonfires. … A story where the city took his name./Giant’s Landing,/or something like that.”