Vintage Item no.9: Ladybird Well-Loved Tales

Decimalisation had just come in, and they cost fifteen pence each. Slim, matte-covered hardbacks you could buy at the newsagents. We were talking about my addiction to Ladybird books this weekend, when my family was visiting. Mam was saying that she'd buy me one every time we went to the shops. I remember the slightly crayony smell of them, and reading them again and again until I had them off by heart. They were the first thing I was conscious of collecting: fascinated by the titles listed on the back of each volume.

I think it was the slightly more obscure of the folk and fairy tales that appealed to me the most. The Giant Turnip and the Magic Porridge Pot. That wonderful tale I found myself repeating in a class I was teaching recently - about the wolf coming to the house of the goat family. Trying to fool the kids their mother was home, by dipping his paw in flour and poking it round the door. Some of these were terrifying. None more so than the tale of the troll under the bridge and the doomed pedestrians (Goats again!), or the Ladybird version of Beauty and the Beast.

These books were illustrated in what I think of as a very 1950s style. Photo-real. Rather literal. Brilliant sunshine. They were very English, commonsensical tellings of the old tales, retold with the economy and good sense with which other Ladybird series taught you about Nelson or motorcars or what birds did in winter.

I seem to have my reading organised in strata in my memory. Under the jumbled stuff I've read in recent decades are the books I read as a teen - and under that are the Puffins and Disney... back and back in time.. to the start of the Seventies and the deepest layer of all. Underneath Noddy, even. And that's where the bedrock is - the 'well-loved tales' that Ladybird published in their series that collectors know as '606'. I've never been tempted to hoover this lot up again from ebay or abe or wherever. I don't seem to need to.

My sister is 17 years younger and, in my early twenties, I used to read to her a lot. The Ladybird books by then were dreary corporatised, americanised things. Rife with clipart and unimaginative text. Tie-ins and cash-ins and looking like just anything you could get anywhere. Why's no one reprinted the original 606's? I want to see those characters in their strangely dehistoricized Britain. It's a land in which some people are a bit eighteenth century in their gilded palaces; aristos dancing with goblins and dallying with trolls, and others are Medieval peasants on farms that rear monstrous vegetables and talking beasts...