Ladybird Histories: British History

Product Information

The Ladybird Story: Children's Books for Everyone. London: The British Library Publishing Division. 2014. ISBN 978-0712357289.

Wills & Hepworth first began publishing Ladybird Books in 1914, and registered the imprint a year later. William Hepworth recognised that publishing a range of children’s titles could be profitable during the war years; he decided to use the time between printing jobs, when the presses were idle, to publish inexpensive books. Early Ladybird books included classic fairy tales and light-hearted stories for children. For the first few decades, Ladybird books were printed sporadically between regular printing commissions and remained a small side project to Wills & Hepworth’s core business. The archive collection comprises approximately 20,000 original artworks, proofs and some documentation from the 1940s to the present day, including examples of the work of notable artists such as C.F. Tunnicliffe, Rowland Hilder and Allen Seaby. The collection covers the wide range of subjects Ladybird published, ranging from What to Look for in Spring to the recent Ladybird Experts series. And even when an edition is stated, it really isn’t clear what that means. Sometimes a book from an earlier and a later edition are identical in every detail while books in the same edition can be different in quite striking ways.Ladybird began publishing books in other formats in 1980. Most of the remaining titles in the classic format were withdrawn in 1999 when their printing facility in Loughborough closed. In October 2015, it was announced that Ladybird books would be publishing its first series of books for adults. The eight books, which parody the style and artwork of the company’s books for children, include the titles The Hangover, Mindfulness, Dating and The Hipster, and were written by television comedy writers Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris. They were published on 18 November 2015. [10] The series follows a trend of other spoof Ladybird books including We Go to the Gallery by Miriam Elia who had previously been threatened with legal action by Penguin. [11] On 5 July 2016, Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, announced that they would publish American adaptations of the Ladybird Books for Grown-ups, called The Fireside Grown-Up Guides. [12] The exhibition is based on my own collection of artwork and artefacts – and the only Humphris artwork I own is this visual recount of Mutiny on the Bounty from a 1970s edition of Look and Learn magazine. I put it on display when the exhibition opened in Canterbury but since then I have had to cut down the number of artists included and, without the original Ladybird artwork, he didn’t make the cut. Original artwork for Look and Learn Magazine – Mutiny on the Bounty In November 2014, Ladybird signed up to the Let Books Be Books campaign and announced that it was "committed" to avoiding labelling books as "for girls" or "for boys" and would be removing such gender labelling in reprinted copies. The publisher added: "Out of literally hundreds of titles currently in print, we actually only have six titles with this kind of titling". Its parent company, Penguin Random House Children's division, would also be following suit. [6] [7] open-wing logo– the first Ladybird logo which shows a ladybird in flight – this is the logo used in the 1940s and 50s.

joint venture with Leonine Holding, The Walt Disney Company, Bauer Media Group and Hubert Burda Media. Armistead, Claire (22 September 2015). "The flyaway success of the Ladybird art prank". The Guardian . Retrieved 20 August 2016.

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Touchstone to Publish an American Version of the Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups Series". AdWeek. 5 July 2016 . Retrieved 5 August 2016. Before there was Ladybird Books, there was Wills & Hepworth. In 1867, Henry Wills opened a bookshop in Loughborough and expanded his business into printing six years later. In 1904, William Hepworth became a partner at the business and the company became Wills & Hepworth, though Wills retired shortly after. Whiting, D. S. (1981). "Sex Role Stereotyping and Ladybird Books". In Forum for the Discussion of New Trends in Education (Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 84–85). Chicago Skelton, C. (1997). Revisiting gender issues in reading schemes. Education 3-13, 25(1), 37–43. Chicago