Valediction 20: An Early Ladybird
Brian Alderson packs up an interesting if somewhat disappointing early Ladybird.
I am not sure how sorry I shall be to say farewell to this volume. For one thing, it is a poor piece of production and illustration and for another it offers the child reader perhaps the worst ever example in a long list of failures elsewhere to do justice to its original Danish author. All suffer much from having drawn upon faulty sources (For instance the title of the Ladybird story is The Brave Tin Soldier [recte: The Steadfast Tin Soldier]. ‘It was a little boy’s birthday, and all his presents were put on his plate at breakfast time. One of the presents was a wooden box that rattled because there was something inside it …’. In Naomi Lewis’s translated version this more correctly reads, ‘There were once twenty-five tin soldiers; they were all brothers, for they had been made from the same tin kitchen spoon…’).
The volume is, as far as I know, the only representative of an earlier Andersen volume that was published in 1914. This had Talbot designated as an author and possessed nine rather than eight stories. As such it proved to be the very first of the Ladybird series. Its publisher was a Loughborough printing house, Wills and Hepworth, and it seems likely that they were moved to create it at the outbreak of the First World War. They may have feared that hostilities would interfere with their standard printing activity and they had the idea of publishing children’s books as an additional source of income.
The Andersen must have proved a success not only because it must have warranted a second edition but also because of very many subsequent Ladybird series volumes. To begin with these consisted of possibly over seventy story books and the like which were not only rudimentary in production standards but often disgracefully so. For instance, another book in 1914 Tiny Tots [sic] Travels provided some holiday stories which formed a resource for repeats of both stories and illustrations in several subsequent volumes. In another case the same contents appear in books with different titles, while in Tales of the Train the 48 pages have almost nothing about railways at all.
It is hardly a consolation that these often dreadful books are of a rarity beyond most others in children’s literature and I have rarely seen two copies of any one title. In the 1930s they set about changing their style and published several whopping story books advertised as written by popular authors, none of whom was the least bit known. They also diversified with better produced painting and tracing books. I have given a complete list of these Ladybird series volumes at the start of my bibliography of Ladybird Books in my The Ladybird Story which was published by the British Library in 2014 but almost immediately sold off to Amazon (The reason given was that it was too scholarly which seems a strange argument from our National Library).
My list of these early Ladybirds runs to almost a hundred titles not all of which are known – many indeed are missing from the BL itself.
By way of a repeat performance Wills and Hepworth set up a new Ladybird Books series in 1940 at the start of the Second World War. The first of these, Bunnykin’s Picnic Party, was written and illustrated by Angusine MacGregor, who had written or illustrated individual books and children’s annuals from the start of the Century.[1] They demonstrated the hallmark of what was to become a world famous series, the printing of every volume being made from a single folded sheet of paper. Although there were some 18 volumes attributed to MacGregor apparently over 16 years, they were probably written within the first few years of the publication of Bunnykins. Even in these more gracious times Wills and Hepworth went their own way.
Brian Alderson is a long-time and much-valued contributor to Books for Keeps, founder of the Children’s Books History Society and a former Children’s Books Editor for The Times. His most recent book The 100 Best Children’s Books is published by Galileo Publishing, 978-1903385982, £14.99 hbk.
Biblio details:
[Ethel Talbot] Short Fairy Tales. Illustrations by Mary Faith. The Ladybird Series. Printed in Great Britain. 250 x 190 mm. 94pp (front fixed pictorial endpaper [1] title page as above [2-92] text. Eight illustrated stories presumably translated by Talbot from an unknown source. Final fixed endpaper ending story. Black and white illustrations throughout, the whole printed on rough featherweight paper. Binding: Paper over boards, front pictorial title in full colour Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales, rear blank, green paper spine. Nd [1916]
[1] Her first illustrated book was Crude Ditties by S.C.Woodhouse, published by Swan Sonnenschein in1903
