Category: Pony books
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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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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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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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BAME books in the horse world
The horse world, at least as portrayed in most horse and pony stories in the UK, is pretty uniform. It’s a world that’s generally white, that’s generally middle to upper class and that is generally female. Not that a preponderance of female characters is a bad thing, in my opinion. The pony book is the…
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Seven pony book myths
Lauren Brooke wrote the Heartland series Lauren Brooke is a pseudonym used by three authors: Linda Chapman (whose idea the series was) wrote most of the books in the series, with Gill Harvey and Elisabeth Grace contributing some titles. Linda wasn’t responsible for the Chestnut Hill books. Those were written by Catherine Hapka and Elisabeth…
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A few things you might not know about pony books
Black Beauty wasn’t the earliest pony book. The earliest one I’ve found is The Memoirs of Dick, the Little Poney, which was published in 1800. Patricia Leitch also wrote as Jane Eliot. Under that name she published four stories: Pony Club Camp, First Pony, Afraid to Ride and Jacky Jumps to the Top. The Pullein-Thompson…