Collecting King Penguin Books
The Penguin publishing house was founded in 1935 and by the outbreak of war in 1939 it was already very successful. Walter Neurath, an Austrian Jewish refugee, had the idea of printing a series of books, based on the model of the German Insel Verlag series, consisting of attractive pocket books. Allen Lane of Penguin Books took up the idea and christened the series King Penguin, so as to distinguish it from his other paperbacks. The first two titles British Birds and A Book of Roses were published in 1939 and Lane knew immediately that he had a winner.
The covers of the King Penguin series played a big part in the success of the series and some of the covers are little works of art. One of the very popular ones is English Ballet printed in 1944, the trademark Penguin on the spine has been dressed up in a tutu. The fact that a third of each book was taken up by illustrations and images and that there were well-produced plates, often in colour proved very popular with the readers. Continue reading »
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Many of us will remember reading and owning Ladybird books when we were children. We read them or our parents read them to us and we hall have fond memories of the small books with their colourful illustrations on the cover. In those days you just had to part with 2 shillings and 6 pence and a Ladybird book was yours. In recent years a collectors’ market has grown around them and you would have to part with a lot more money for an original Ladybird book in excellent condition, especially if you are looking for first editions.
When collecting Ladybird books you should be looking for the early ones, before the shiny covers were introduced in the 1980s. Some have become more collectable than others – a 1964 copy of Cinderella, complete with dust jacket, would cost around £200, while The Impatient Horse, which only ran for three series would be £300.
People collect Ladybird books for a number of reasons and nostalgia certainly plays a large part. Cinderella is one of the best loved chilren’s stories and hence very popular. Another one to look out for is Six Adventures of Wonk from the 1940s, it has lovely illustrations of a little koala bear by Joan Kiddel-Monroe. This one is quite difficult to find and if you can get a first edition, complete with dust jacket in good condition you would need to pay around £100.
Ladybird books were published in themed series and many people like to collect by series. Many collectors like the Well Loved Tales series because it reminds them of their childhood when these might have been read to them as bedtime stories or the books were used to teach them to read. There was a grading system from level 1 (The Three Little Pigs) to level 3 (Beauty and the Beast). Continue reading »
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