Archive for July 2010
Baby Puffins
Posted on: July 31, 2010
I saw Baby Puffins (‘fiendishly rare’) in an antiquarian book catalogue recently, going for nearly £298 each! I bought mine in a Blackheath junk shop many years ago for 10p each. Ha! They’re a bit frayed around the edges though.These were nos. 1 & 2 in the series produced by Noel Carrington from the 1940s.
Does anyone know anything about the illustrator Dorothy Chapman? I have tried to find out but with no luck.
Val Falla
Posted on: July 29, 2010
Noel Carrington, the editor of Country Life in the 30s, commissioned wonderful illustrations for Puffin Books from established artists, and I wanted my book to have that same feel for visual excellence. This is why I asked a friend, Val Falla if she would create the pictures for Leo’s Heroes with a whiff of 50s nostalgia. She had studied illustration at the Royal College of Art under Edward Bawden whose influence is evident in a lot of her work. I am thrilled at the connection.
See her gallery of work at http://www.val-bob-falla.org
I really, really wanted designed end papers, but alas, too expensive.
Collecting
Posted on: July 25, 2010
Sugar-spun peep eggs bought in
Oxford Street Woolworths in the 1960s
Leo is a fledging collector, and the things he collects appear in some of his adventures. I used to scour junk markets in the 60s and 70s, revelling in spotting and buying paper ephemera, tin toys, seaside souvenirs, cracked alabaster peep eggs, toy film strips, magnetic dogs, cardboard dancing Betty Grables, plastic whistling birds, and plaster pigs pooing long tails of ash from their behinds. For many years all these handsome and desirable objects were displayed around the house; but now everyone has latched on to the kitsch value of all those vanishing remnants of popular culture. (Mine are now stored in boxes in the attic, and when I come across one of my items of desire, I experience a faint tinge of sadness – at its fragility, its essence of the past – and glee that I found it first, before those retro-designers in their Brick Lane studios were born!)
The sugar peep eggs above are still in good condition wrapped in their cellophane, although I bought them forty years ago. In my childhood these eggs were bigger I’m sure. I stared at them with longing through the shop window, but I don’t remember ever, ever getting one. Perhaps today’s collectors were deprived of coveted toys as kids?
I now collect all the books and ephemera I can find and afford (usually on eBay), on certain illustrators and graphic artists of the 30s, 40s and 50s; Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Barbara Jones, Barnett Freedman, Charles Mozley, Harold Jones among them. I suppose that these artists have a style which reminds me of my childhood — perhaps echoes of the Festival of Britain? There are others who were passionate about popular culture long before we knew the term, and many of them wrote splendid articles for The Saturday Book: Olive Cook, Enid Marx, Pearl Binder, Dodie Masterman, George Speaight. They were friends of Marguerite Fawdry who opened the first Pollock’s Toy Museum in Monmouth Street, and who I came to know well. I delight in these few degrees of separation.
See the first chapter where Leo meets Benjamin Pollock in his Hoxton toy shop.
Where did the ideas come from?
Posted on: July 23, 2010
My partner Stephen and I have nostalgia for our childhoods growing up in London and quite often indulge in remembering the heaven which was the books and comics we read then. We were delighting in recalling the bizarre ads shown on the comics’ back pages, when Stephen mentioned that he once sent away for sea monkeys. These duly arrived dried in a packet, coming to microscopic life when dropped in a glass of water. The ads showed drawings of mummy and daddy sea monkeys in sunglasses, and the daughter in a mini-skirt. How cool is that? The disappointment was the size of these miniature crustaceans, half that of a flea by the sounds of it. Dead a week later probably.
A very funny book *Hey Skinny: Great Advertisements from the Golden Age of Comic Books, has many of the American ads from the 1940s and 1950s. My favourite from 1953 is the “INVISIBLE HELMET”. ‘Put it on … Now you see people – they can’t see you! Be the first in your neighborhood to wear it. You will be envied by everyone. Order immediately. Satisfaction guaranteed. $1.99.’ Only ten years earlier, children were wanted by Uncle Sam. ‘Rush coupon NOW!’ for a Junior Air Raid Warden Kit. (Boys! Be ready for enemy air attacks. Just What Every American Boy Needs.)
Do kids today experience that same potent desire to have ‘unlimited hours of fun’, ‘thrills and fun galore’ (there’s a word we don’t hear much now)? ‘Your chance to be popular’, ‘Oh Boy! More fun than a 3-ring circus!’ ‘Wanted! Boys and girls for the movies!’ ‘Now you can scare the Devil out of people with this Luminous Ghost Mask!’ ‘Love can be yours again!’ All those exclamation marks! So exhausting!!
After we’d finished hooting with mirth and exclamation, I suggested that it would be really sad if a child perchance, reading a 50 year-old copy of one of these comics found in Granny’s attic, completed a coupon (cut here, next to a tiny pair of open scissors), and sent away for whatever marvellous product was on offer, obviously never ever to receive the goods. This sparked the idea to create a story. I used to be a Trustee of Pollock’s Toy Museum in London, and know a lot about the history of the juvenile drama. A speech balloon appeared above my head: my eyes looked up to see what was written there. “A boy will find an old advertisement and send away for a list of toy theatres and plays to perform. He will meet Benjamin Pollock, a real person from the past”. Cut to the next frame: I am hunched over the computer, my hands flying over the keyboard. A box at the top explains (in that beloved comic-style printing) that the boy would become a time traveller and meet other actual people who really lived, but they’d be unusual, little known today. Our hero would help these people, and change the course of their lives with his intervention. To be continued …….
* Chronicle Books 1995
It’s out there!
Posted on: July 22, 2010
Leo’s Heroes is now on Amazon!
The book has gone to the printer. Marketing campaign meeting at the publishers on 2 August.
Remember to check out the children’s blog at http://leosheroes.wordpress.com
The story will unfold there over the next few weeks with lots of pictures.
Me, an author?
Posted on: July 20, 2010
Eeek! I’ve written a children’s book and it’s being published by Book Guild of Brighton. You may have a passing interest in why I wrote this book. Who do I think I am you cry. I’m certainly not a struggling author. Why do I think it should be published? Of course, I’ve written loads of things before – reports, method statements and proposals, essay assignments for my degree, but never a creative story (silly mysteries informed by the Upper Fourth at Malory Towers composed at 13 don’t count in my back repertoire.)
Writing Leo’s Heroes was a satisfying experience, I had fun, I was excited by this thing which completely took me over for a few weeks. And I had to follow where it led. Later I contacted a couple of agents in a half-hearted way, and I may have even approached a publisher (yawn), without luck you won’t be surprised to hear. Did I have the motivation to become a published children’s author? What was I to do with my book? I shrugged dismissively and quickly forgot about it.
But after the manuscript had lain disregarded for some time in that ubiquitous drawer all scribblers maintain, I decided to take a short cut and buy in the professionals, the way one might hire caterers for a fancy dinner party. (I confess that I pay a friend to do my gardening.) I could, you might protest, use my savings more usefully to back pack around South America for a year, or try sky diving; I might spend time trekking along the Great Wall of China, take up the challenge of the Advanced Motorist Course. But none of these things appealed to me as adventurous occupations. (I must admit guiltily that there’s a smidgen of timidity for physical exertion somewhere in my genes); also my time is committed to a little drama teaching, studying for a degree, and volunteer guiding for a local tourist spot. I don’t have the time or the stamps, to continually send off chapters and polite letters of introduction to agents (publishers no longer want unsolicited manuscripts it seems) in order to receive back equally polite rejection letters. I needed to get a life, take matters into my own hands – and I know what – pay to see my book in print. Sorted.
I have gone into a partnership publishing deal, where I pay for the editing, proof reading, printing, promotion, distribution, representation, and everything else a publishing house does to bring a book to the reading public. This surely is the adventure – an unknown future where anything could happen. It’s not so-called vanity publishing – I don’t seek fame, and I certainly won’t make a fortune. I never had fame when I was an actress, so I know I can handle the shame of possibly not selling more than ten copies of my book. (Who remembers my appeareances in The Whitehall Worrier or Dixon of Dock Green? Or even the Jaffa oranges girl being parachuted over Wimbledon Common scattering fivers (fake) into the wind. “Who knows where Jaffa oranges come from? Win five pounds for the correct answer!”)
This partnership method is a good model I feel, since the publisher is only doing what every other publisher does for the author, but has the cash flow to keep a list going without growing an enormous slush pile. What’s wrong with the author putting up the dosh? The publisher makes money and I receive royalties. They say that they can’t publish every manuscript received – surely they must get hundreds each year? – so the fact that they’ve chosen Leo’s Heroes to be published, for me is some sort of validity … We’ll see.
More later on my illustrator Val Falla.
Leo’s Heroes. What’s the story?
Posted on: July 8, 2010
Go to the children’s blog at http://leosheroes.wordpress.com to find out more, and read extracts from each chapter.
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