The blog.
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Finding Jinny
by Siân Shipley I remember it like it was yesterday. 1993. Down past the shopping precinct, the cricket pitch, the playing fields and back again. My schoolfriend Becky, sat on her chestnut pony Pepe outside the bakery, holding the reins of big bay Jolly whilst her Mam queued for sausage rolls. The surgery, the play-ground,…
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Broncho: one of the most outstanding horses jumping at Olympia between the two world wars
I first heard about famous show jumper Broncho through a book called Broncho that wasn’t about him at all. Richard Ball’s Broncho (Country Life, 1930) was inspired by the horse, but the publishers said: The book is not meant in any way to be the life story of the horse, as Mr. Ball claims no knowledge greater than…
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Step Back into Childhood: pony book heaven
Step Back Into Childhood April 7–21 2025 It’s been a whirlwind few months, working on this exhibition. The Museum of the Horse in Tuxford is the most amazing place to visit. I love visiting the museum, and seeing all those things that connect us to a world that’s now gone. The Museum’s new exhibition, Step…
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First catch your unicorn
The pony book has often nodded towards what was going on in the children’s book genre as a whole: adventure in the 1950s, realism in the 1970s, and from the 1990s, fantasy. In 1997, J K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published. It was an astounding success, and spawned a host of fantasy-themed children’s…
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It’s pink! It sparkles! It must be a pony book!
The 1990s and early years of the 2000s saw many pony books leave behind the realistic covers of the 1950s and 1960s. A substantial proportion of those aimed at the younger reader were badged with pink and sparkles, and winsome straplines. Peter Clover’s 1990s Sheltie series was a rare example of a series that succeeded…
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The pony book in WWII: part 2
This is part two of the talk I did some years ago at a children’s books conference. You can find part one, which looks at pre-war pony books, and those books that generally didn’t deal with war, here. Do you mention the war? For pony book authors, there is a pretty sharp division by sex which…
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The pony book in WWII: part 1
A few years ago I spoke at a children’s books conference at Bristol on pony books in World War II and how the war changed the way horses and riding were portrayed in children’s literature at the time. The main theme of the conference was hobbies and how they were portrayed in children’s books, so…
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And the next one is … pony books in the 1990s
Disapproval of pony books by critics of children’s fiction may have had an impact on the British market, but it certainly didn’t in America. British librarians tended to view pony fiction as elitist and outmoded: American librarians saw it as a way of hooking in readers. Terri A Wear wrote Horse Stories, an Annotated Bibliography in 1987…
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The 1980s and the pony book
By the 1980s, the number of old titles being re-published obscured the fact the number of new titles had plummeted: only half as many were printed in the 1980s as in the 1960s. The new This was the decade that saw the publication of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse (1982), though it made little impact at the time. …
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Pony books in the 1970s
The 1970s saw a hefty cut in the number of pony books published. Only half as many were published as in the 1960s. Reprints Plenty of titles were still appearing, but many of them were reprints. The Jill books appeared in a new guise with covers by W D Underwood. Pullein-Thompson titles were regularly reprinted…