The Ladybird Story: Children's Books for Everyone

I love the ladybird books I read as a child, and was surprised to find they were UK books with a short printing time in the USA. I am always on the lookout for used books at yard sales and library book sales. This is a really nice history and guide to this imprint.

Excellent reference material.

This is a most detailed and informative history of Ladybird Books. It incorporates 160 colour illustrations and a detailed appendix of published titles. A strength of the book is that it compares and contrasts Ladybirds with other contemporary titles that covered the same territory and it covers in considerable detail the predecessors of the familiar two shilling and sixpence titles (a price maintained for 29 years) which were very different in appearance. However there appear to be some omissions which could easily have been avoided. In the appendix of Ladybird titles the Discovery range which appeared in the 1990's and covered such titles as Sharks, Religions of the World and Planets is inexplicably absent. The wonderful range of illustrations include far too few actual Ladybird book covers and far less actual illustrations from this iconic range of books than one would have expected. For example there is only one illustration by C F Tunnicliffe from almost 100 that he painted for the four volumes of What to Look For Books. There are very few pages from actual books and one picture is worth a whole page of words. However in mentioning words it would have been most interesting to have compared the texts of books that were modernised, such as titles in the History series, and shown how comments that were once considered quite suitable had to be re-written into a more acceptable version. Very few illustrations are included which show how illustrations are updated - various websites and magazine articles have demonstrated this over the years to great effect. Additionally, the opportunity to show how a title such as Nelson appeared initially with a dustjacket, then appeared in identical format with matt boards, then appeared with blue-framed boards and finally with a different picture in a laminated version has not been adopted. As Ladybird was such a significant pictorial series and its illustrations are what most readers remember the series for, it is disappointing that the two authors did not include more Ladybird artwork and consider the design of their book more thoughtfully. The authors, perhaps, not surprisingly are unable to decide why Ladybird Books are now a shadow of their former glory but to their credit they have used an extremely comprehensive range of sources. As more than twenty sources are websites it is strange that they did not use some of the illustrative methods that these sites have used so effectively. The authors do not hesitate to be critical and comment on how various series peter out, some individual title series were deserving of more examples and how books in a series often forged no relationships between themselves. Even in a series (Animal Tales) in which the first ten books had the same author and artist the authors inexcusably refer to Noel Barr with the masculine pronoun (the author was actually Dorothy Noel Barrow) and criticise the quality of the writing of a very popular series and the fact that the tenth book had one less page of text! As this reviewer's copy of the book in question (The Sleepy Water Vole) has the same number of pages of text as the other nine books in the series (and one more than the number quoted), one can only presume that the authors used a reference a copy that was mutilated from a car boot sale or charity shop! They are very critical of the 'Uncle Mac' series and state that they have no coherent shape and they are referred to as spatchcock work. In conclusion, this is a worthwhile book but the various errors and disappointing design mean that the definitive Ladybook Story is still to be told.

This was a present and the recipient was very pleased and found it very interesting.

Very interesting and informative. More illustrations would have been good . Well pleased.

Wonderful book on the history of ladybird books.