Penguin is releasing eight Ladybird books for grown-ups next month as part of Ladybird Books’ centenary celebrations. You might be tricked at first glance because all the original artwork from the Ladybird archive has been used, but with decidedly different titles.
Gone are the days when Ladybird’s Peter and Jane told you about their watercress sandwiches and Pat the dog’s yearly bath. The eight new titles include the Ladybird Book of the Hipster, of Dating, of the Mid Life Crisis, of the Hangover, of Sheds, and of Mindfulness, along with spousal advice in the form of How it Works: The Husband and How it Works: The Wife.
The new series pulls very few punches – Ladybird are now much more cynical than you might remember.
“When we’re young we wonder if we’ll be a surgeon or an astronaut. We can be anything we want to be. Then one day we can’t,” begins The Ladybird Book of the Mid-Life Crisis. Eek!
“That bit makes me cry. It’s too close to the bone,” says author Joel Morris, who helped write the new books.
Morris wrote the books with his writing partner Jason Hazeley. The pair are in their 40s but have strong memories of the original books from the 1960s. They decided to write as if they “were time travellers from the 1960s looking at stuff such as online dating and night clubs.”
However, this decision has caused them some trouble as despite the vast archive of Ladybird artwork, the world they were written in was quite a bit more innocent than the one they were writing about today.
Morris says in the original books “mum is at home with the kids and dad is at work fixing a Lancaster bomber. It’s hard to find images that have men and women in the same picture. Luckily, that’s become part of the joke.”
Though a number of people have already tried to create parody versions of the original Ladybird books, with more grown up and dark titles, Penguin have quashed their efforts pretty quickly, in order to protect the brand.
Because of this, Morris and Hazeley feel they’ve been given a unique opportunity. “It’s like being allowed to mess about with a national treasure. It’s like repainting Saint Paul’s,” Morris says.
