PBOTD 2nd August: Ruby Ferguson - Jill and the Perfect Pony

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PBOTD for 2nd August is another faller. Well, the fallen. Jill's just bitten the dust after Plum the Perfect Pony has done her worst. This is the copy I had. I'm sorry to keep putting up the ones I had, but they're the ones that I think about whenever I think about the story, because they're the ones I read and read and read. One thing I did notice when I was a bookseller was that it was the actual editions people had read as a child that they wanted to find again - not necessarily the beautiful first edition, or another, prettier edition. 


It's those childhood memories we're looking to recall: the emotions we felt as a child, and they are encapsulated in those editions we first read, whether they're beautiful or not. I did find that some people, after they'd bought the ones that called out most strongly to their childhood selves, returned and bought the first editions, or another, more beautiful edition. I think that after having satisfied the child, perhaps we go on to look for the best edition of the book we can find, and honour the book itself, rather than our childhood memories of it.

That's certainly what I did. I bought first editions of Jill's Pony Trek and Jill and the Perfect Pony to sell on, but I kept them both. I then added the Armada 1960s edition, because I rather like them. They seem to sum up that era of 1960s pony books: a cross between the modernity of the convenient paperback, and the solid qualities of the original: text and illustrations mostly unchanged.



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