I love the original classroom posters that you can still occasionally find right at the back of school cupboards. Made to support the 1960s Peter and Jane Key Words reading scheme, they were the interactive whiteboard of their day. Collector…
Read more
… in the form of an 11-minute interview Yesterday the latest showing of my exhibition ‘The Wonderful World of the Ladybird Book Artists’ opened at the Victoria Gallery in Bath. Just before it opened I was interviewed by a local…
Read more
Collecting pre-1940s Ladybird books
Read more
If you have been following the story, you know that the special M.O.D- commissioned Ladybird book is the holy grail of Ladybird book collecting – a book thought to exist but which has never been seen. The story so far…
Read more
Jane – fictional heroine of the Peter and Jane reading scheme books – was my role model, growing up. In some ways we had a great deal in common: we were both born in the mid-1960s, we both had one…
Read more
If you were going to appoint a governement made up of Ladybird book characters, who would you choose? Here’s my top team: Chancellor of the Exchequer: The Ogre from Jack and the Beanstalk. Keeps tight control of financial affairs –…
Read more
My Aunt died last month. She never married and myself and my brother were her only younger relatives. As I was clearing her things, last week, I came across this short piece she had written. When and why, I’ll probably…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more