Are you sitting on a Ladybird gold mine?

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Look closely enough at any bookshelf in Britain and you’re likely to find a Ladybird book. By putting down roots in my family home, I find The postman and the postal service, Rumplestilt Hide And How it works: the hovercraft – as well as some less wholesome titles from a 2015 adult parody series (How it works: the husband). Unfortunately, we were only able to earn a few euros from the collection. For the lucky ones, a single volume could order hundreds.

Collector Helen Day began scouring yard sales for Ladybird books in 1999, shortly after having a baby. She has now accumulated 10,000 titles, but was intrigued by how little was known about the publishers who originally produced them. In 2000, she hand-coded a website chronicling their history (ladybirdflyawayhome.com), and people started contacting her to tell her stories about the business. “It had been completely under-researched,” she says, “so collecting books turned into collecting history.”

Helen Day’s copy of High tide

Bunnikin’s Picnicthe first classic Ladybird book

The name Ladybird was trademarked in 1915 by Wills & Hepworth, a Loughborough-based printing company which began producing children’s picture books during quieter times. But the books didn’t take off until 1940, when wartime paper rationing led the company to experiment with different formats. It was discovered that a single sheet of paper could be neatly folded to form a 56-page paperback, now considered the “classic” Ladybird format. When, in the 1940s, editor Douglas Keen noticed a demand for children’s nonfiction, Ladybird shifted from publishing nursery rhymes and fairy tales to factual titles. The Key Word Reading program followed siblings Peter and Jane as they cooked, rode bikes, and bought candy, all while teaching new vocabulary to young readers. It had sold more than 100 million copies as of 2016.

The Ladybird books brought a very black and white world to life

Other titles were a little less successful. “The rarest books are often those that were the least popular at the time. » The fictional tale High tidea rhyming story about sea cats, and The impatient horsean adventure involving a wandering milk float, are notoriously sought after: a copy of The impatient horse is currently available for £250 from Keswick Bookshop. Here again, popular titles like those from 1944 Cinderella command high numbers due to sheer demand. “Cinderella was the only one in this series to be published in packaging,” explains Maria Goddard, a buyer specializing in rare and collectible books. Stella and Rose’s booksthe first edition of which costs £180.

The first edition of Michael Coughlan Cinderella

The impatient horse – sold for £97.99, countryhouselibrary.co.uk

One of Ladybird’s first adventures in original fiction, a series about the exploits of a boy and his koala called Wonk’s Adventuresis also collectible. There is a title that Day calls a “Loch Ness Monster” because “no one knows if it was actually published”: a single cover version of How it works: the computer was reportedly ordered by the Ministry of Defense to train its employees. Although still missing from Day’s collection, a visitor to his traveling exhibition, The wonderful world of ladybug artistsconfirmed the existence of the elusive edition since his father had ordered it.

The improvised nature of Ladybird’s publishing operations makes identifying (often more valuable) first editions a minefield: they were known to completely rewrite and re-illustrate books but left the original publication date on the title page . (If you picked up an old Peter and Jane book and were perplexed to find Jane in a pair of jeans, here’s why. Try again and you’ll find the little white dress you remember.) Some books incorrectly say “original edition “.

Wonk’s Adventuresfrom the collection of Helen Day

Day meticulously lists helpful clues on his website. Does the Ladybird logo have open wings (from the 40s or 50s) or closed wings? If the price isn’t decimal, that dates the book to before 1971. “Often you find rich choices at antique bookstores,” she says, “where the staff doesn’t know what they have because he doesn’t look for the right things.” eBay, however, is now the most successful patch. Farmer Michael Coughlan uses it to stock his collection, which he organizes in his larder in County Waterford, Ireland. It has a first edition Cinderellabut Bunnikin’s Picnicthe first classic Ladybird, still eludes him.

“The Ladybird books brought to life what was previously a very black and white world; it was an explosion of color,” says Lawrence Zeegen, professor of illustration at the University of the Arts London and author of Ladybug by design. Ladybird’s illustrators included war artist John Kenney and Royal Academician Charles Tunnicliffe, “the greatest natural history illustrator of the 20th century”, says Tim Loe of natural history specialist Loe Books. Like many artists, Tunnicliffe worked as a commercial illustrator after the financial crash of 1929; it is now these works for which he is best remembered.

Tunnicliffe’s original watercolors What to look for series, seasonal vignettes of frolicking lambs and leaping squirrels, are stored in the Ladybird Books Ltd Archives at the University of Reading, along with 20,000 other works of art. “Few artworks emerged on the open market because they were owned, by contract, by Ladybird,” says Zeegen. Cotswolds Bookshop Books and ink is selling illustrator Roger Hall’s original gouache paintings for Ladybird’s history book about prison reformer Elizabeth Fry online (from £150).

Ladybird was acquired by Pearson in 1972, then by Penguin in 1998. For many collectors, interest in the books wanes after this point. But the ingenious design and high production value of the old numbered series continue to appeal. The collecting community, Day adds, is an Internet “oasis” where everyone is unusually polite, or as she puts it, “terribly Ladybird.”