Ladybird Histories: British History

Product Information

These are not particularly laudable reasons for collecting first editions, but let me add another which will apply to some collectors. All different editions tell us something about the history of the company and the possible reasons behind changes, omissions and revisions. The first edition may give us more of this sort of information than most because it is the start of the story. With Ladybird books, the situation can be more complex, however. Definitions Many of us will remember reading Ladybird Books as children. From format to content, their books are designed to help young readers and inspire learning.

Highlights from the collection now feature in the Ladybird Gallery at The Museum of English Rural Life, which opened in 2016, generously funded by Ladybird Books Ltd. As a child, I was particularly fond of the History series and he illustrated Henry VIII, Drake and Hannibal. The illustrations have all the colour and gusto you would associate with a classic Ladybird history book. But for some reason they never felt like old friends to me – I expect it was because my eye was tuned-in to the style of artist John Kenney who had illustrated almost all the previous history books. After the company was sold in the 1970s, a number of the original history titles were completely re-written and re-illustrated and Humphris produced a couple of these. But to a child who has grown up with one version, a new edition feels like an outrage. Wills & Hepworth began publishing Ladybird books in 1914. Their range of children’s books evolved into Ladybird books the 1940s. Ladybird books today The Ladybird Story: Children's Books for Everyone. London: The British Library Publishing Division. 2014. ISBN 978-0712357289.The last time I met him was shortly before he died. Sadly, he had lost nearly all his sight, and needed to be helped around by his wife. My mother became very friendly with her after his death. She was a lovely Irish lady, who had met him when he was a young art student. She had been his life model at the time.

In short, in terms of children’s book publishing at this time, Wills & Hepworth were making things up as they went along. And that’s no small part of the charm for me.

Exhibition: 'The Ladybird Artists - 1940 to 1975'

And even when an edition is stated, it really isn’t clear what that means. Sometimes a book from an earlier and a later edition are identical in every detail while books in the same edition can be different in quite striking ways. Skelton, C. (1997). Revisiting gender issues in reading schemes. Education 3-13, 25(1), 37–43. Chicago By the 1950s, the success of book publication began to eclipse the other aspects of the compay’s output and the approach to production became ever more standardised – although they retained a rather quirky ‘ kitchen-table‘ flavour throughout the life-span of the company. Spoof Ladybird books target adult market". BBC News Online. 12 October 2015 . Retrieved 12 October 2015.

Ladybird books are much loved in the UK. Shown here is one of the commemorative stamps issued by the Royal Mail in 2017. Dating Ladybird books And yet I tend to forget about him – and I’m trying to work out why. Here are some reasons – none of them good enough. Ladybird Books is a London-based publishing company, trading as a stand-alone imprint within the Penguin Group of companies. The Ladybird imprint publishes mass-market children's books.Johnson, L. and B. Alderson (2014). The Ladybird Story: Children’s Books for Everyone . The British Library, pp. 1-66. Gani, Aisha (12 October 2015). "Ladybird books introduce Peter and Jane to hipsters and hangovers". The Guardian . Retrieved 30 December 2015. Ladybird books made a point of never branding books as ‘for boys’ or ‘for girls’ but I grew up wanting to read about princesses – real or fictional – rather than about fighting and the Wild West, which was Humphris’ specialist subject. Maybe this is really the same thing as the previous point, but in many aspects of life today we seem driven to seek out the ‘exclusive’. For example, the acquisition of designer items seems ever more to be seen as something to aspired to, something which – regardless of intrinsic merit – validates the owner in some way. Perhaps First Editions are the equivalent in the book-collecting world.

In October 2015, it was announced that Ladybird books would be publishing its first series of books for adults. The eight books, which parody the style and artwork of the company’s books for children, include the titles The Hangover, Mindfulness, Dating and The Hipster, and were written by television comedy writers Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris. They were published on 18 November 2015. [10] The series follows a trend of other spoof Ladybird books including We Go to the Gallery by Miriam Elia who had previously been threatened with legal action by Penguin. [11] On 5 July 2016, Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, announced that they would publish American adaptations of the Ladybird Books for Grown-ups, called The Fireside Grown-Up Guides. [12] open-wing logo– the first Ladybird logo which shows a ladybird in flight – this is the logo used in the 1940s and 50s. The company traces its origins to 1867, when Henry Wills opened a bookshop in Loughborough, Leicestershire. Within a decade he progressed to printing and publishing guidebooks and street directories. He was joined by William Hepworth in 1904, and the company traded as Wills & Hepworth. In particular Ladybird books have captured a period of British social history. Read more . . . The publishers Before 1965 Ladybird books were published with dust-wrappers. After 1965 the books were produced with a matt-finish pictorial board. In the 1980s the books began to have gloss-finish boards.

How it works: the special stamp

However, I can safely say that I positively love his artwork in one little group of books which I haven’t mentioned till now: the Do You Know books. These 3 titles were part of the group of books to support the Key Word reading scheme books, a set which also included Danger Men, Record Breakers and Some Great Men and Women. Before there was Ladybird Books, there was Wills & Hepworth. In 1867, Henry Wills opened a bookshop in Loughborough and expanded his business into printing six years later. In 1904, William Hepworth became a partner at the business and the company became Wills & Hepworth, though Wills retired shortly after. The exhibition is based on my own collection of artwork and artefacts – and the only Humphris artwork I own is this visual recount of Mutiny on the Bounty from a 1970s edition of Look and Learn magazine. I put it on display when the exhibition opened in Canterbury but since then I have had to cut down the number of artists included and, without the original Ladybird artwork, he didn’t make the cut. Original artwork for Look and Learn Magazine – Mutiny on the Bounty The archive collection comprises approximately 20,000 original artworks, proofs and some documentation from the 1940s to the present day, including examples of the work of notable artists such as C.F. Tunnicliffe, Rowland Hilder and Allen Seaby. The collection covers the wide range of subjects Ladybird published, ranging from What to Look for in Spring to the recent Ladybird Experts series.