Books, Mud and Compost. And Horses.

There are some wonderful pony book covers out there, and then there are the ones that stick in your mind for all the wrong reasons. The original hardback edition of Gillian Baxter's  Horses in the Glen  had a prettycover by Elisabeth Grant. The Children's Book Club edition had something copied, rather badly, from Mathilde Windisch-Graetz's  The Spanish Riding School.  The Children's Book Club had form for producing iffy covers. Here is their version of Monica Dickens's Cobbler's Dream (which arguably is not a children's book anyway – or at least only for a child with a strong stomach). The Michael Joseph first edition is infinitely better. Possibly the most glorious Children's Book Club effort is this one, for Monica Edwards's The Wanderer , which does make you wonder if the illustrator had ever seen an actual horse. Fortunately the original artist, Joan Wanklyn, had. Scholastic Book Services (who, like the Chil...

Have you written a pony book? Writing a book is one thing, but thinking of a title for it is quite another. Do you tell the reader exactly what they’re going to get, or do you hint at it? Publishers in the past worked on the fair assumption that if you were looking for a pony book, the word ‘pony’ shoe-horned into the title would probably do the trick. And going by the evidence of the eighty years of so that the pony book has been going, they were not wrong. What do we want? We want a pony (and there’s a title for you for free, because as far as I know, no one’s snaffled that one, nor, oddly enough, He Wanted a Pony ). Diana Pullein-Thompson kicked off her solo publishing career with I Wanted a Pony and Peggie Cannam followed with She Wanted a Pony . There were titles that addressed the fantasy of owning a pony: the iconic Wish for a Pony, followed by Dream Pony (a popular title, this one), joined by A Very Special Pony , The Magic Pony and The Paradise Pony an...

(With more than a nod to Horse and Hound, who have done similar things for the 80s and 90s.) Elephant-ear jodphurs were still a thing The Jacatex page in PONY Magazine was something you poured over for hours at a time, trying to work out if there was some way you could magic together the enormous amount of shillings necessary to get the ‘Pat’ riding mac. Or the ‘Pat’ hacking jacket. Or the ‘Pat’ jodphurs. Anything, really, that wasn’t the elephant ear jodphurs that were about third-hand when you got them. Reading PONY Magazine cover-to-cover, even Pat and Pickles, which somehow you never really took to. Knowing Jill’s Gymkhana off by heart. And Jackie Won a Pony . And I Had Two Ponies . And No Mistaking Corker . And any other pony book you could get your hands on. Riding ponies up from the field in just a headcollar. You had a hat as a small nod to health and safety. Your riding teacher thinking that standing on the pony’s quarters as it was going...

Eleanor Graham retired as editor of Puffin Books in 1961. Her place was taken, briefly, by Margaret Clark (who was responsible for publishing Tolkein’s The Hobbit , a book of which Eleanor Graham had had a dim opinion). Although Margaret Clark had been promised the Puffin editorship, she was shunted sideways, as Allen Lane, Penguin founder, met Kaye Webb and saw in her an inspirational editor of children’s books. Webb was appointed in 1961. She had previously edited Elizabethan (a magazine I never saw–the nearest I got was Nigel’s mention of it in Willan and Searle’s Down with Skool series). Her career history had covered many aspects of the creative world, from working as a 15-year-old for Mickey Mouse Weekly , replying to children’s letters, to broadcasting for Woman’s Hour , and working with her then husband, Ronald Searle, on several of his books. Webb was not just an editor and brilliant spotter of the unusual and the best: she was an inspired promoter. There is little ...

Puffin Picture Books to me had it just right. Their illustrations were things of simple beauty. They weren’t in any way child-like, quirky, or hitting a particular, temporary, zeitgeist. The illustrations of the only Puffin Picture Book I had as a child (Henry Wynmalen’s Riding for Children , found at a Methodist missionary society jumble sale) gave me a sunlit, rural world in which lived a perfectly behaved grey pony, and a kind and expert instructor who gave considered and elegant riding lessons where you had no need to wonder why you were being taught the hands-in-lap show ring style that had been out of fashion for decades.  It, and its fellows, were the idea of Noel Carrington (1884-1989), who in the 1930s was working for publishers Country Life as an editor and designer. He had tried to interest them in his idea of a series of factual books for children that explained the world around them in books that were inexpensive, yet profusely illustrated in colour. Countr...

If you missed part one, which covered the morning of the Cambridge Horse Tales conference, you can find that here . One thing I did forget to mention in the first post was the book shop, with every modern pony book you can imagine, and several I couldn't, having fallen back more than somewhat in keeping up with what is going on in the pony book world. Purely in the interests of research, I bought books. It would have been rude not to. The bookshop was run by the lovely Marilyn Brocklehurst, of the Norwich Children's Book Centre . The first afternoon session was by Melanie Keene. I loved this session. I've never been quite sure how I ended up in the fields of literature, because I am never happier than when fossicking about in ephemera and documents. This talk featured an enthralling selection of  horsy toys, lesson plans, books, and even wallpaper, illustrating the central part the horse played in Victorian life, and in that of children in particular. The horse...