Ladybird Children’s Classics, Gulliver’s Travels, 1976

Ladybird Children’s Classics, Gulliver’s Travels, 1976

The Ladybird Children’s Classics series caused a bit of a stir when it first came out in the late-1970s, but it proved to be a long-running series and was presumably popular.  I believe many commentators of the time were very much against the ‘dumbing down’ of these books, which took classics of children’s literature and wrote them in simplified form and Ladybird format.  The counter-argument is, of course, that the series worked as an introduction to books and writers that children might otherwise not come across, at a period when TV was rapidly replacing books as a child’s staple of entertainment.

Gulliver’s Travels, 1976 was written by Jonathan Swift, retold by Marie Stuart and illustrated by Martin Aitchison.  This is the first in the long series of Children’s classics and the cover style ‘swiftly’ changed to bring it in to line with later books in the series.  This is the revised style.

This copy.

This copy has the original matt boards and is in good condition externally – brown marks to the cover bring it down (see photos) but very good inside with nice, clean pages.