Author: Jane Badger
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The Jill books ride again
One of the questions I used to get asked quite often as a publisher of classic pony books was, ‘Why aren’t the Jill books available?’ The last time the Jill books were in print was when Fidra Books managed to license the rights in the 2010s, and printed the first few of the series. And…
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The beginnings of Polocrosse
I’ve written earlier about the National School of Equitation, and its contribution to the sport of polo and women’s sport. This wasn’t the NSE’s only contribution to sport: it was also where the modern sport of polocrosse began. The origins of polocrosse had become rather obscured until relatively recently, as the NSE’s contribution was forgotten…
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Pony Tales and Puffin Books III
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…
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Pony Tales and Puffin Books II
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…
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Pony Tales and Puffin Books I
When I wrote Heroines on Horseback, I looked briefly at the impact that the development of paperback publishing had on the pony story. I was looking then at publishers like Armada, the paperback arm of Collins, whose business model was to produce paperback versions of books children wanted to read, in an often standardised and abridged…
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The Saving of the Railway Horse
If you travel on the railway now, you’d never know that the horse had been an essential part of its workings. The stables are gone: demolished or converted. The huge provender store at Wellingborough, which kept thousands of horses in London fed, is no more. There are no horses working in the shunting and goods…
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The Jinny Books by Patricia Leitch (2)
After the Gold Horseshoe edition of the 1990s (which you can see, along with the earlier editions, here), there were no completely new Jinny editions for another 20 years, but there were compilations, and a partial hardback series. Hardbacks The Jinny series’ true first editions were in paperback by Armada, so if you look for…
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The Jinny Books by Patricia Leitch (1)
Patricia Leitch’s Jinny books are Marmite: you either love or loathe. I only met the first two, For Love of a Horse and A Devil to Ride as a child, because the others all happened along once I had supposedly grown up. But I love them. It took me decades to catch up on them…
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The National School of Equitation
Every now and then I like to write about riding schools: principally I think because it’s where the bulk of my equine experience lies, and I’m fascinated by what the riding school means to other people, and what the riding schools themselves were like. With this particular riding school, I found a story I wasn’t…
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The blacksmith’s, Roxby
I came across the photograph below in a World War II copy of Riding magazine from Jan-March 1943. If you’re wondering about the unusual dating, Riding was then down to four issues every year because of paper shortages. At its foundation in 1936, and through to the early years of the war, it was a monthly publication. As…