A Ladybird First Book of Hymns and Songs, 1969

Ladybird First Book of Hymns and Songs, 1969, serie 612.  Opening this book feels like a nostalgic trip back to 1960s school assemblies.  Even if you have no interest in religion, you’ll find it a lovely, notstalgic book because of the masterful A Buchanan illustrations.  It’s a shame Alexander Buchanan did no other work for Ladybird after this book as he has just the right touch and has produced some excellent work in this one volume.  I understand he was quite a well-known Scottish watercolour painter – so perhaps this was a rare venture into commercial art for him?

This book is remarkable not only for it’s beautiful illustration but also for the fact that it was revised just a year after publishing.  The reason for the revisions seems to have been administrative – to do with correctly crediting the creators of the published hymns and songs.  But this means that the collector may want to get hold of both the original and the revised books – if only for the charming fact that the children depicted on the cover are singing out of the book they are pictured on – and in the revised copy they are singing from a revised copy!

This copy:

This is a matt edition.  It’s in good condition, with wer the boards (especially the edges) and some grubby marks but generally good pages.  This copy is the revised edition.  It dates to the 1970s and has an original price of 30p on the back.