Valediction Number 27: Perkin the Pedlar
Brian Alderson is presenting his collection of children’s books to Seven Stories and Newcastle University. Amongst them, is a book that he first encountered at kindergarten.
My first schooling took place at Miss Jones’s kindergarten in Wellington Road, Enfield, where I first encountered Eleanor Farjeon’s Perkin the Pedlar in 1933/34. I have always recognised it by its cover design and it must have been an early edition. I am sorry to say that I never learned the alphabet from it nor yet the locations of the places whose titles Eleanor Farjeon used in her text. Nor did her stories or poems have any effect. But I enjoyed Clare Leighton’s pictures. This may have been an early example of her work, for she joined the Society of Wood Engravers at about this time, but her pictures were mostly pen and pencil or crayon drawings.
I was only at Miss Jones’s for about a year before progressing to a preparatory school in Winchmore Hill. It may be of interest that two other pupils who lived in Wellington Road were Jewish refugees after Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. I knew them as Franz and Rudolph and my father, who spoke good German, was friendly with their parents. Their father’s name was Spier and he had been a manufacturer of board games. He continued the business in England under the name of Spear and 
eventually had the rights to market Scrabble!
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
Eleanor Farjeon. Perkin The Pedlar. With illustrations by Clare Leighton. London: Faber and Faber.
225x156mm. [Half title, blank]. [1 blank, 2 colour frontis., 3 title-page as above, 4 imprint], 5-6 contents, [7 added half title], 8-10 introduction, [11 black and white portrait, 12 blank], 13 intro. Contd., [14 introduction concluded and half-page black and white illus., 15 “A”], 16-18 story: Appledore, [19 colour illus., 20 twelve line illus. poem], 21-205, continuing series of place names in alphabetical order with various additions of stories, poems and full-page illustrations in black and white or colour, ending with Z for Zeal Monachoram, [206 blank]. Wrap round coloured cloth over boards; blank end papers, front free endpaper with manuscript gift inscription: “To Dear Teddy from Auntie Joan Parren with love on this third Birthday. February 15th, 1937.”; lacking dust jacket.
