Professor Michael Wooldridge
How I came to write a Ladybird Book
Anyone over 45, brought up in the UK, will probably have encountered the classic Ladybird Books series. If, like me, you were a rather bookish child, you would have owned an armful of them. They taught us how to read (with Peter and Jane). They taught us about historical figures ( Nelson, Napoleon), far-off places ( India, The Holy Land), ancient civilisations ( Rome, The Vikings), and the working world ( The Miner, The Nurse). And they taught us quite a lot about Jesus ( Baby Jesus, The Loaves and Fishes).
Ladybird Books was founded in Loughborough, Leicestershire, in 1867. But the first book in the classic Ladybird format – Bunnikin’s Picnic Party: a story in verse for children with illustrations in colour – wasn’t published until 1940.
There was a rigid format. Each book was 56 pages, with 24 pages of text, each accompanied by a specially commissioned illustration. The text was straightforward; illustrations were colourful and uncomplicated. The books were robustly bound in hardback, and small enough to fit into a coat pocket. And they were cheap.
Although the Ladybird imprint dates back to 1915, the heyday of the classic series was the three decades from the end of the Second World War, when hundreds of titles were printed, and millions of volumes sold. By the 1970s, the series’ world-view was beginning to seem dated. My colleague Christopher Tyerman, a professor of history at Oxford University, is a fan of the series, but uses them in his lectures as an example of British historical prejudices. ‘Richard the Lionheart is shown as a physically dominant figure fighting half-naked locals,’ he points out. ‘They are full of attitudes that would be hard to defend today.’
Although the books were updated to better reflect the modern world, the classic series was in decline by the late 1980s. And the format began to seem tired: new publishers such as Dorling Kindersley offered glossy, new formats with striking, modern visual styles.
Although the Ladybird name continued, the classic series was effectively in hiatus from the late 1990s, until it was unexpectedly reborn with the Ladybirds for Grown-ups series in 2015. The Grown-ups series matched illustrations from the classic books with subversive text. Instead of Baby Jesus and Richard the Lionheart, we had The Hangover and The Mid-life Crisis. It was a perfect postmodern combination. The books were a huge hit.
In 2017, the classic series itself was rebooted, starting with a volume by the Prince of Wales on Climate Change. At about this time, I was toying with the idea of writing a popular science introduction to artificial intelligence (AI). There has been a lot of interest in AI recently, but much press coverage is deeply uninformed. As an AI researcher, I wanted to set the record straight.
So I set to work on The Road to Conscious Machines, and my agent tried to find someone to publish it. A few weeks later, she sent me a cautious email. ‘I know it isn’t really what you set out to do,’ she said. ‘So please don’t be offended, but how would you feel about writing the Ladybird Book on AI?’
I thought about it for precisely one second. The format I was given is identical to the classic series: 24 pages of text, each of no more than about 230 words, each with a newly commissioned illustration. At this point, the challenge became clear. AI is a huge topic. How could I do justice to it in this restricted format? More than this, Ladybird Books have a wide reach and a long shelf life. What I wrote could potentially shape the way a lot of people think about AI for decades. If I got it wrong, my colleagues were going to be very cross with me.
I set some ground rules. First, I would play it straight. No jokes, no smart-alec allusions. The next principle was balance: there are parts of AI that I don’t approve of, but this was no place for a public squabble. So, try to represent the broad church. I drew up a list of 24 headings and reworked them until I was happy. After that, the writing was easy.
Next were the illustrations. I envisaged serious, technical illustrations, perhaps with just a few funny ones to lighten things up. I imagined they’d be done by an impoverished art student. When draft illustrations started arriving, I was astonished to discover that the artist was Stephen Player – a world-class illustrator who, among many other things, had illustrated some of Terry Pratchett’s books. His illustrations were not the simple technical drawings I had imagined. They were quirky, funny, rich, characterful – bringing the book to life in a way I had never imagined.
The project has received far more interest than anything else I’ve done. Most academic colleagues think it is a wonderful opportunity to communicate science to a mass audience. Some, though, are sniffy about it. But I think they are just jealous. And so they should be. After all, I wrote a Ladybird Book.
Michael Wooldridge is a computer science professor at Oxford University. He is author of ‘Artificial Intelligence: a Ladybird Expert Book’ (Ladybird Books, £7.99), published 22nd March
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