Category: Pony book history
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Thelwell and the ponies who plot
Norman Thelwell was probably best known for his ponies. He was the illustrator of many pony-mad children’s childhoods: not the lovely dream of a matchless grey swishing round the show ring, festooned with rosettes, but the foul tempered pony determined not to be caught and entirely deaf to any suggestion that it be schooled. Much…
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The Committee for the Advancement of Men in Equine Literature
It was time for the monthly meeting of the Committee for the Advancement of Men in Equine Literature. From the very dawn of the pony book, it had worked tirelessly to ensure the proper representation of men and boys in equine literature for the young. Today was no different. There was always a pre-meeting lunch,…
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Was Jill’s pony black or piebald?
And what was his name? When Jill fans get together, there is one topic that always exercises them. Was Jill’s pony, Black Boy, black, or was he piebald, and was his name Black Boy or Danny Boy? The answer is ‘both’, and that it depends on what edition of the books you read. The original…
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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 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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Marjorie Mary Oliver and Eva Ducat
Marjorie Mary Oliver (1899–1976) and Eva Ducat (1878–1975) wrote some of the earliest pony books, with stories that focused on children and their adventures rather than telling the story from the pony’s point of view. The three books they wrote together – The Ponies of Bunts (1933), Sea Ponies (1935) and Ponies and Caravans (1941)…
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Jill: the Reading Order Question
If you have a set of the paperback Jill books, and you’ve been busy replacing them with the hardback versions, you might have noticed that the reading order is different in the original hardbacks. The original publication and reading order of the Jill books is: The Knight paperbacks have altered this reading order. In the…