Tag: pony books
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What to call your pony book
Have you written a pony book? Writing a book is one thing, but thinking of a title for it is quite another. Do you tell the reader exactly what they’re going to get, or do you hint at it? Publishers in the past worked on the fair assumption that if you were looking for a…
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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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And then … pony books in the 1940s
After Joanna Cannan introduced her heroine Jean to the world in A Pony for Jean (1936), she opened the gate to a fresh wave of stories. Ann Stafford wrote a fine holiday adventure in Five Proud Riders (1937), with young authors Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock contributing decent examples of ponies and holidays in their Oxus series in the late 1930s…
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The pony book: how it all began
Animal books there were in plenty in the 1800s, but these were animals telling their own story. There were cats, dogs, the occasional pony, and donkeys, and then in 1877 came Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty. Black Beauty told the world what it was like to be a working horse in Victorian Britain. It was a…
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Heroines on Horseback: what’s in it?
CHAPTER 1: ‘I Remember the Day I was Born’ How it all began: what was the earliest pony book written? And who was responsible for moving the genre away from trotting obediently in the footsteps of Black Beauty, with pony biography after pony biography? This chapter looks at authors like Eleanor Helme, Marjorie Mary Oliver, Golden…
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Heroines on Horseback: FAQ
What is the book about? It’s a look at the pony book from its earliest trot up until the 1970s. All the major authors are featured: Ruby Ferguson, the Pullein-Thompsons, K M Peyton, Monica Edwards and Monica Dickens, and many more. There’s a chapter looking at the development of the pony book in this century,…