You can normally judge a vintage Ladybird by its cover. For many years the standard approach was to use an illustration from inside the book on the cover. But some Ladybird books really under-sold themselves on the shelf. This is…
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Vintage Ladybird books are famously hard to date because the dating conventions usually used by booksellers rarely work with Ladybird books. The following pages will help you take a book and work out its date. They WON’T help you work…
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Wild flowers and garden flowers. You’d think the skills required to illustate one book or the other would be much the same – but that’s not how one artist saw it. ‘British Wild Flowers’ (1957) is one of the best-loved…
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The following is the text of a brochure created to accompany an exhibition of Harry Wingfield’s Ladybird illustrations, held at the New Art Gallery, Walsall, Feb 1st – 17th March 2002
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The lovely Kate Garner has written this catchy song which pays homage to the ‘well loved’ books of her childhood. I’ve added a gallery of all the books that she mentions – so you can play the song and click…
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Lynne Bradbury, 9th June 1947 – 9th June 2020 I’d like to take you on a journey through a cardboard box, and on the way I’m going to talk about Lynne Bradbury. What part did Lynne Bradbury play in the…
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Lynne Bradbury 9th June 1947 – 9th June 2020 By Lynne’s brother Richard. My sister, Lynne, was born in Congleton, Cheshire in 1947. She was the first child of George and Vera Bradbury who married just before the war ended….
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A guest post by historian Adam Chapman, inspired by a picture by Ladybird artist Ronald Lampitt “A Farm in February is the title of this ‘Picture to Talk About’, published in Treasure Magazine, 1963. But what Ronald Lampitt’s illustration does…
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Not many of us like the sound of their own voices, do we? But in this podcast, recorded recently during (what number are we at now?) the second lockdown, you get not only my voice but the warm, gravelly tones…
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