Winnie-the-Pooh had many exciting encounters with woozles, balloons, and irritable bees – but the one adventure his creators would never have dared suggest for the bear of very little brain is that, heading towards his 90th birthday, he would star in a large exhibition at the V&A Museum in London.

The exhibition will open this week featuring close to a century’s worth of Winnie-the-Pooh merchandise, including toys, books of the wisdom of Pooh on subjects as arcane as Taoism and management theory, a Russian bear created by a designer who had clearly never seen the original, and a hand-painted Christopher Robin and Friends china tea set presented to the baby Princess Elizabeth in 1926 – either she did not like it and never played with it, or more probably was just a very careful child.

The walls of the exhibition, the most comprehensive on some of the best-loved children’s books of all time, are lined with scores of ink and pencil drawings of the characters and settings by EH Shepard.

His first book illustrating AA Milne’s deceptively simple stories about his son and his toys was published in 1926. Though the author had long since moved on to other subjects before his death in 1956, and the real Christopher Robin had come to loathe the books and worldwide fame that made him an involuntary celebrity, Shepard continued to draw the small inhabitants of Hundred Acre Wood, giving away scores of drawings and working on hand-coloured versions of the illustrations to within months of his death in 1976, aged 96.

Dozens of his originals are in the V&A collection but are so fragile they were last displayed almost 40 years ago.

The show’s curator, Annemarie Bilclough, attributes the longevity of the four books – runaway successes on publication and never out of print since – to the winning combination of Shepard’s images and Milne’s writing.

“They are just so well-written, so humorous and so brilliantly characterised that they’re a pleasure both for children to read, and for the adults who mainly buy the books, and often have to read them aloud over and over again. The characters are so well-drawn they are instantly recognisable – everyone knows an Eeyore.”

Although another illustrator worked on the first Winnie-the-Pooh story – a Christmas special printed by a newspaper in 1925 – Bilclough said that after the first book Milne knew he had the perfect partner in Shepard. He negotiated a 20% share of the royalties for Shepard, instead of the flat fee more common for illustrators.

The drawings show the care Shepard took, producing vivid sketches of real trees in Ashdown Forest, where the Milnes had bought an old farmhouse, to get the setting absolutely right.

The exhibition is designed by RFK architects and Tom Piper, the theatre designer who created the installation of thousands of ceramic poppies made by the artist Paul Cummins, which filled the moat of the Tower of London to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war.

His design fills the galleries with spaces where parents will find it impossible to follow small visitors, including a narrow flight of steps leading to a slide, and Owl’s tiny door with the brass bell labelled “RNIG ALSO”.

• Winnie-the-Pooh: Exploring a Classic will be at the V&A Musuem in south-west London from 9 December 2017 until 8 April 2018.

• This article was amended on 5 December 2017 because an earlier version didn’t include RFK architects as designers of the exhibition.