Ladybird Book nostalgia - part one

Good morning everyone, looks like Spring has arrived finally, sunny, blue skies, but still quite a chilly breeze.

As I get older I find that I become more nostalgic about times gone by - pretty normal I guess for everyone.  One thing I used to absolutely love was the Ladybird Book series - they were published in my home town, which we were very proud about.  We didn't have a TV when I was little, so I started reading at a very young age - well before I started school.  And Ladybird books were a key part of that process.  The quality was excellent, and the price affordable - crucial as we didn't have much money.  But my Darling Mum always found enough to buy me books on a regular basis.

She has all my collection of Ladybird books, but I rather fancied having a few of my key favourites here at my house.  So I started trawling the local charity shops, no luck.  So then onto Amazon, and, amazingly I found my two most favourite titles, at 1p and 60p (ok so there was £2.80 postage but even so...).  So after a few clicks, these two were winging (sorry about the pun!) their way to me.

And here they are:

Both were written by E L Grant Watson, and illustrated by C F Tunnicliffe, RA.  The Winter title was published in 1959, and the Autumn title in 1960 (when I was born, giving my age away now!!) Both titles sold for the princely sum of 2s6d, 12.5p in today's money.  How I loved both of these titles, my love of Autumn and Winter has been with me as long as I can remember.  I would read and re-read these books, to this day I can remember passages from them.  Many facts about nature that I still recall now came from the texts of these little books.

So I thought it would be nice to share a few of my favourite illustrations from each book - would you like to see?

Today I will share illustrations from What to look for in Winter.

This is the finely detailed pen and ink drawing on the title page.  We are very lucky here, there is a lot of mistletoe growing around the town, you see it on trees when driving along the ring road...

This is first colour illustration.  A time-honoured way of hedgelaying, good to see this craft is seeing something of a resurgence in our local countryside...

I always loved this picture because of the fungi in the foreground and because it reminds me of our local outwoods..

This reminds me so much of a local lake, I wonder if the artist actually took his inspiration from it...

A lovely, frosty, wintery morning, just look at the detail on the cobwebs, so finely observed...

Fieldfares and redwings, we only get to see them if the weather is extremely cold, I didn't see any this winter...

Watch out bunnies!

Just love the colours of the sky, I was lucky enough to see a fantastic display of starlings in formation this winter...

And finally, this closely observed illustration, I think of it each time we have late winter snow...

I really hope you enjoyed looking through some of my favourite illustrations from this lovely old book, back soon hopefully with What to look for in Autumn.

Have a lovely Sunday, Helen