THOSE EERIE LADYBIRD COVERS

I always found some Sixties Ladybird book covers a little creepy as a kid. All those talking animals and fairytale people.

Beauty and the Beast with its ape in a suit gave me the shivers, 

especially as I always associated it with Poe's terrifying tale Hop Frog in Creepy magazine back then.

The Elves and The Shoemaker was unsettling too. Those little cobblers gave me the willies!

Did you have any thoughts about Ladybirds?

Do you collect them?

COLLECTING TAXIS: IT STARTED WITH TOOTLES BY TERRANOVA47

Hello Woodsy

My return to collecting toys happened when I was in college and reading Tootles the Taxi to my god-daughter in the evenings. 

Since I drove an FX3 it was the poem I had to keep reading. 

Getting bored with the limited book and realising that the drawings were of Dinky Toys, not the real thing, I started looking for old Dinkys to expand the poems.

I found a number in junk shops and then realised that some toy shops still had old stock for the same price as 'antiques'. 

I drew the pictures, Lauren's mother wrote the poems and I had the originals laminated and spiral bound into a unique book. The boy and girl became Lauren and her friend Henry and the dog became Rufus, Lauren's old English sheep dog.

The only poem/story I remember was Rufus running amuck in a butchers. This was a big exaggeration as I have never known a better behaving dog than Rufus. That's why Lauren laughed her way through that story every time.

Attached are pictures of the Dinky taxi and the Tootles drawings. Compare the wheel hubs, position of fog lamp and headlights to the real thing [pictures to follow] and you can see the Dinky source.

Regards,

Terranova47

NYC

USA

Tales from the Haunted Toy Box: A New Year for the Mid-Lifer by tony k

I don't know about you, but I loved Ladybird Books as a kid.  Most of us read or collected them. I still have a handful of my dog-eared originals, and I sometimes splash out if I spot them at the car boot. 

They were a story telling landmark in our early social development. They educated and orientated us with positive role models who would inspire us to set our standards high. 



 Beautifully illustrated, each pocket size hardback was populated with bygone heroes of derring-do, packed with tales of heroism, adventure, discovery, and invention. They portrayed an idealised, very-British, stiff upper lip, representation of the world.  

Ladybird shaped our childhood expectations for the adventures which lay ahead. But somewhere along the way everything changed.  Innocence was lost, and we grew older... middle-aged in fact.   

Like outgrown childhood friends, we lost contact with those enlightening little gems of wisdom that captivated us as kids.  Or so I thought, until I stumbled across one on eBay called, The Mid-Life Crisis. 

I immediately high-fived the Buy-it-Now option in a desperate bid to learn more about the fate of so many of my peers and contemporaries.  

The caring mother of childhood literature, Ladybird, is once again reaching out with guidance and wisdom. 

She's an old friend reuniting with her former class of aging, accelerated culture kids, who, like a bunch of forgotten supermarket bananas, are facing the cruel realisation that they are often considered past their social sell by date. 

Ladybird is like an omnipotent teacher watching over her wayward wards. She's had her finger on the pulse though.  

Now she's come back to share the enlightenment of her observations, with her outta-step, outta-place, Baby Boomers and early Gen X-ers. 

The 'Mid-Life Crisis' stays true to the style, format, and charm, of the traditional Ladybird hardback.  Although the tone of the text has grown more sardonic with age... as I guess, we have... it's still funny though... I think?

Please don't worry if any of the cynical depictions have a ring of unsettling truth, or prompt hesitant self-denial... we can still laugh about it all, old pal... so long as we remember that we can no longer crush and crunch those Gobstoppers like we used to... just in case our brittle middle-age teeth crack and crumble, and cause another mid-life crisis!


Tony K

The Glory Days of Space by WOTAN

The sixties were a great era to grow up in. Space travel was everywhere and on everything. I wanted to be an astronaut at age 5 (still waiting at 47) and my imagination soared. I collected space books voraciously alongside the toys, and chief among my favourites was the British Ladybird book, Exploring Space. Printed in 1964 with fabulous colour illustrations by a B. Knight, this and 'How Rockets Work' fired my enthusiasm for space with gorgeous pictures of streamlined rockets and space stations. When it was re-issued some years later in the wake of Apollo, the Mercury capsule was replaced by a LEM and all the futuristic rockets had gone in favour of Saturn Vs. Recently I spotted a nice space diorama set made by Marx on Ebay US (pictured). The set has a small copy of the larger battery Moon Grabber toys and a handful of blobby space rocks and a couple of wayward astronauts. The box states 'hand painted by artists' and looking at the sloppy way the vehicle has been decorated, I wonder if the artist was actually in zero g conditions at the time! What caught my eye though was the clearly stolen box artwork - the three main rocket and space station pictures had been lifted directly out of the Ladybird book (pictured)! Not content to subtly alter the pics and avoid any copyright issues as is the case with the Nuclear Ferry and the plagiarism of Bob McCalls art, Marx clearly decided these inexpensive items would not be around long enough to draw the lawyers attentions. Even so, its a very clear indication that toy designers and their respective companies obviously used contemporary literature as their sources of inspiration.

Nice one WOTAN.