How Ladybird books for GROWN-UPS have f lown to the top of the charts

THEY’ RE part of our national fabric: a throwback to happier, gentler, more innocent times. Their tone was simple but helpful, their illustrations were small-scale works of art, their world was one of endless promise and happy nuclear families, and they covered everything from the classic fairytales to space travel.

Now Ladybird Books – even those two words bring an in voluntary smile of nostalgic pleasure – has marked the centenary of its founding by releasing a new series . . . for grown-ups.

And if the bestseller charts are anything to go by, the appeal of that famous red-andblack logo is as strong as ever. The newlyy released Ladybird books have so far sold more than 100,000 copies, with publisherr Penguin Books – which owns the brand – printing more than a million more in anticipation of bulging Christmas stockings everywhere. Ironically, it is the firm’s biggest order since the very adult Fifty Shades Of Grey in 2012.

The new books use original Ladybird illustrations and typefaces, but there’s a cruciall difference. They’re spoofs squarely aimed at grown-ups rather than children, with titles such as The Ladybird Book Of Dating, The Book Of The Hangover, and the How It Works guide to The Husband and The Wife.

Spoof Ladybird books aren’t a new idea. The juxtaposition of genteel, almost twee imagery with comic captions has spawned many internet flights of fancy, and last year r Penguin threatened artist and comediann Miriam Elia with legal action unless she withdrew her book We Go To The Gallery, in which Ladybird’s child characters Peter r and Jane try to make sense of modern art.

BUT this new series is the first one authorised by Penguin, and there’s real heart behind the deadpan comedy. The books skewer the fears and insecurities we all share, the belief that our lives haven’t turned out as we imagined they would. The Ladybird Book Of The Mid-Life Crisis begins with the words: ‘When we are young, we all dream of doing something wonderful and exciting with our lives. What will it be? An astronaut? A surgeon? Anything is possible. And then, one day, it isn’t.’

The success of the new titles is a tribute to the mastery of the originals. In its heyday, Ladybird employed 25 full-time illustrators, giving an idea of the sheer scale of the operation. Between 1940 and 1980, the company published 646 separate books – that’s one every three weeks.

Most were pocket-sized, measuring roughly 11.5cm by 18cm, and comprised 56 pages – a format chosen because a complete book could be printed on a ‘quad crown’, a large standard sheet of paper 76.2cm by 101.6cm, which was then folded and cut to size.

The remarkable efficiency of this operation meant that the books stayed the same price, 2/6 (roughly 20c) for almost three decades.

Looking back through the original Ladybirds is to glimpse a world long gone in this age of iPads and Islamist terrorism. In the Sixties People At Work series, men do almost all the jobs — The Airman, The Builder, The Farmer, The Fireman, The Policeman, The Postman and The Soldier. Women do get one title to themselves, The Nurse, but even here ‘the doctors tell the nurses what to do’.

The science books show young children making fire with magnifying glasses, using pliers to strip a battery of its casing and whittling wood with a penknife. Can you imagine any of today’s publishers risking the wrath of Health and Safety that way?

Equally, the How It Works series looks impossibly quaint from our high-tech eyrie. A computer taking up half a room is called ‘small’, and the 1972 Story Of Nuclear Power depicts Sellafield (then named Windscale) with blue skies and happy seagulls – an image clouded by Chernobyl and Fukushima. Meanwhile, the first non-white faces don’t appear until the Sixties – and even then they’re usually in the background. ‘The reason we can now look back and say, “Oh how funny, how quaint, how politically incorrect, how wrong” is because the books lasted,’ says Ladybird enthusiast Helen Day. ‘If it was a teaching manual or something dry and dusty, it would have gone into the attic or chucked away and that would have been it.’

Comedy writers Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris, the brains behind the new Ladybirds, are in their mid-40s and childhood devotees of the originals. Hazeley says: ‘I loved these books growing up. I learned to read through them. As a kid, you felt a bit special being given one. They were just brilliant: positive, comforting, but opinionated too.’

It’s a style the duo – who have written for TV comedians Miranda Hart and Mitchell and Webb – have tried to emulate, albeit with a dry, modern twist.

In their new title The Wife, for example, one picture shows a young bride cutting the wedding cake with her husband. The caption reads: ‘Tina is getting married. It is the best day of her life. Next year, she will claim that becoming a mother was the best day of her life, but only because she was on some very strong drugs.

‘Neither is true. The best day of her life was her eighth birthday, when she got a yellow bike.’

HAZELEY says: ‘The extraordinary thing about that one is that unbeknown to us, it actually happened. The bride in the picture was a woman named Jenny Keen, whose father, Douglas, was the driving force behind the original Ladybird books.

‘She got in touch after we’d written ours to tell us that not only had she been given a bike for her eighth birthday, but that her marriage hadn’t lasted very long and she had much happier memories of the bike than of the husband!’

The spirit of Douglas Keen’s love for the series burns bright in the new books, with their images from Ladybird’s 11,000-strong collection of illustrations and the easy-toread typeface.

Morris says it’s ‘like being allowed to mess with a national treasure’, while Hazeley stresses that the new series is pastiche rather than parody.

‘Parody is savage; pastiche is affectionate,’ he says. ‘That’s why we use the word “grown-up” rather than “adult”. “Grown-up” is the word children use. “Adult” sounds like seedy men in the doorways of shops with blacked-out windows.’

The dedication to each of the eight books says ‘the authors would like to thank the illustrators whose work they have so mercilessly ribbed, and whose glorious craftsmanship was the set- dressing of their childhoods. The inspiration they sparked has never faded.’

Indeed not. And if the success of the new titles is anything to go by, they’ll be part of our cultural fabric for some time yet.