Vintage books

Ladybird Tuesday: The Story of Our Canals

July 14, 2020 by penny Leave a Comment

I’ve become a bit canal obsessed lately. The things is, during lockdown I realised that we don’t live near water. Any water. No rivers, streams, lakes or even ponds. Not close enough to walk anyway.

It was possibly the thing that drove me mad most when we weren’t able to drive anywhere and yet until then I hadn’t realised just how much I loved it. I’d become used to walking along canal tow paths with the buggy pre- lockdown as they are always flat and not too muddy, but I hadn’t realised how much I would miss life on the water when I couldn’t go there any more.

We’re lucky enough to live only a short drive from the Grand Union Canal and it is now our go to place for walks. There’s just always so much to see. The usual coming and goings of narrow boats, but also locks, plenty of wildlife and also a good number of geocaches too.

A picture from The Story of Our Canals showing a canal boat in the foreground and a steam train in the distance.

I know that as someone known for their love of trains, falling a bit in love with canals too may seem a bit weird, but I see it more like loving two children than an exclusivity thing. The relaxed pace of life on the canals is just gorgeous, and especially appealing when everyone else seems to be gearing back up to a pre-covid pace, yet I’m still feeling quite happy to continue as things were in lockdown.

Front cover of the Ladybird book The Story of Our Canals

Whatever my reasons for falling in love with canals is, I definitely feel I should try to expand my knowledge of canal history and life on them. As with so many subjects my first place to look was my Ladybird book collection and The story of our Canals. This title was originally published in 1975 as part of series 601, which was known as the Achievements series.

This title covers pretty much everything you could even want to know about canals in Britain. You can read about the history of the first canals and the increase in demand for them from business people of the time who saw the advantages of transporting materials or finished produce over the water. There’s also a fair amount of details about how canals actually work; how locks are used to enable boats to go up or down gradients and how engineers designing the canals dealt with needing a water supply to not only initially fill the canals but also to keep them full when locks were in use.

A double age spread from The Story of Our Canals showing a map of England and Wales with the canal network marked on it.

Canal life was obviously impacted greatly by the advance of the railways, and that is when families started living on boats more alongside the boatmen. For those who live on canals today, life is obviously very different, but some similarities in the way of life still exist. From all the canal boats that we’ve walked past recently I can tell that all of them use space ingeniously and go to great lengths to make the most of everything they have on board.

A picture from the Ladybird Book The Story of Our Canals showing tow canal boats in a lock.

I’m not at all sure my messy family could ever cope with squeezing everything that own onto a canal boat, but that pace of life, and the closeness to the water and nature definitely appeals.

About Ladybird Tuesday

Ladybird Tuesday is a regular feature here on Penny Reads, where I delve into my Ladybird book collection and choose a title to share with my readers. The weekly series originally started on my old blog, Being Mrs C, and this post originally appeared on there. I’m now in the process of moving all those posts over to Penny Reads and also adding titles that I have acquired since then. A list is currently being compiled here of all the titles I have in my collection.

Ladybird Tuesday – Ladybird Toddler Books – On the Farm

June 16, 2020 by penny Leave a Comment

This week in Ladybird Tuesday, let’s go On the Farm!

At 19 months old, my youngest is now obviously destined to be a book worm. Since as soon as she was able to hold a book she loves looking at them, and now that her language is starting to develop words are coming thick and fast and she loves pointing at things in the pictures and saying what they are. Amazingly she has already mastered the art of making sure the book is the right way up – although she’s not yet as gentle as I’d like her to be with some titles. And let’s not mention the bite marks in a couple of her board books!

Ladybird Toddler Books On the Farm - photo shows teh front cover of the book featuring a sheep and two lambs

We’re at the stage though where I’m starting to brave letting her have paper books when reading with me. Strictly only board books when on her own though! This week I’ve started to introduce her to some of the titles from the Ladybird Toddler Books series from the 80s, and in particular, On the Farm.

The Ladybird Toddler books have featured on Ladybird Tuesday before. My Day made an appearance when Master C was approaching his second birthday, nearly 6 years ago.

These books were part of series 833, a series designed to educate and amuse little ones with things that they would find familiar. I’ve only ever managed to find three titles from the series (My Day, On the Farm, and On the Move) but I should make a real effort to find the others before Tube Stop Baby is too old to appreciate them. I think there were seven titles in total – so four more to try and find once the charity shops re-open. The missing ones from my collection are Puppies and Kittens, Going to Playgroup, Looking at Animals and Look at Me.

A page from Ladybird Toddler Books On the Farm showing a milk tanker filling up on a dairy farm

On the Farm takes a lovely look at all the different aspects on life on a farm. From the early mornings, through to the milk tanker arriving to collect the day’s milk, crops growing in the fields and the sheepdog rounding up the sheep. It’s more than so many farm books that only seem to feature farm animals and nothing further.

The illustrations (by Pat Oakley) are lovely in style in the way that they are realistic, but child friendly at the same time. Nothing too stylised and abstract. The text is relatively simple, with an average of four lines for each double page spread, and often includes a question prompt to encourage small fingers to point things out, or even count things in the pictures.

A double page from the Ladybird Toddler Book On the Farm featuring a pig sty full of a pig and her piglets

I know 80s Ladybird books aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I’ve developed a soft spot for this particular series. Maybe it’s because I see how much my children enjoy them? Whatever the reason, I’m definitely going to try to complete this series in my collection as soon as I can.

About Ladybird Tuesday

Ladybird Tuesday – Understanding Maps and Learnabout … Maps

May 19, 2020 by penny Leave a Comment

I don’t usually feature two books in one Ladybird Tuesday post, but these two books (from different Ladybird series) are actually the same book. Understanding Maps was originally published by Ladybird in 1967 as part of series 671. A series that only ever contained one title and was called Understanding Maps after that title. Learnabout… Maps came later as part of series 634, the Learnabout series.

The Learnabout… series

Ladybird used to do this thing where they released a series with a book or two in it and then, as if one part of the company hadn’t been talking to another part, suddenly the same book would be published again as part of a different series. Maps wasn’t the only title that this happened to. If you look at series 633 (Hobbies / Things to Make) it seems that several titles in this series were published at the same time in the Learnabout series too. Exactly the same contents, but with a different cover.

OS Map Conventional Signs

The text inside the two books is identical. Both even give that away by having the same copyright date of 1967 in them. One way to tell them apart is that inside the front cover is a two page spread on “conventional signs” used on Ordnance Survey Maps.

Ladybird Understanding Maps Learnabout Maps OS Maps Ordnance Survey

The difference is that in Understanding Maps this refers to the One Inch Maps (Seventh Series) and is copyright 1960, yet in my copy Learnabout… Maps it instead refers to the first series of 1:50,000 maps, is copyright 1974, the year OS maps went metric. By now motorways appear in blue, rather than being lumped in with red A roads as they were before.

Inside Understanding Maps

Whichever covered version of this book you get your hands on doesn’t really matter. It is a wonderful book to teach the basics of map reading and is the perfect way to start off a love affair with maps. It covers everything from the first maps through to scales, gradients, contour lines, orientating your map, symbols, the grid system, geographical features and even the setting up of the Ordnance Survey. There are pages on road maps, rural maps, aerial photography, weather maps, physical maps, geology, population, rainfall and land-use maps and even navigation at sea. Apart from obviously not covering satellite navigation and the likes of Google maps there isn’t really anything concerning paper maps that it doesn’t cover.

Ladybird Understanding Maps Learnabout Maps

One of my favourite pages has to be the one on roads, railways, rivers and canals which clearly shows what combinations on a map might look like in real life. It’s a wonderful way of translating what is on paper into reality. It looks wonderful to me on the cover of Understanding Maps and in a way I think it a shame that the cover of Learnabout… Maps looks so dull in comparison.

Ladybird during Lockdown

During lockdown my daughter had some tasks to do for Cubs which involved maps and just handing over a copy of Ladybird’s Understanding Maps gave her everything she needed to know to read a map properly and to understand the grid system.

The key at the front of Learnabout… Maps helped her understand an OS map of our local area, and successfully find our house on it. She then followed on the map our usual route to school and she could look at all the different features we pass on the map and know what they look like in real life. An excellent spot of learning in action if I say so myself. Someone should give her current teacher a pay rise…

About Ladybird Tuesday

Ladybird Tuesday – Comic and Curious Verse

May 12, 2020 by penny Leave a Comment

I seem to have strangely fallen in love with poetry during lockdown. I’m not talking about the highbrow stuff that doesn’t rhyme in any way. Instead I’m into the rhyming, slightly silly stuff that will leave a smile on your face. The sort of poem that may be slightly nonsense in content, but amuses people. Basically the type of poem that loads of wonderful primary school teachers are recording themselves reading and then uploading online as a way for them to stay in touch with their school classes.

I’m responsible for uploading a load of these to YouTube for the school where I’m a governor and it’s lovely seeing grown ups read stories and poems to kids. Kind of like a CBeebies bedtime story, but when you know the presenters really well. It’s made me think about the poems I loved as a child and the ones that used to make me laugh. Maybe that’s why I’ve been drawn to Comic and Curious Verse for this week’s Ladybird Tuesday.

Published in 1983 as part of the Poetry series 831 I’m pretty sure I had a copy of Comic and Curious Verse as a child. It just seems so comfortingly familiar. The verses inside come from a variety of sources and include names like Spike Milligan, Edward Lear, Roger McGough (who I was lucky enough to have visit my primary school when I was a child), Michael Rosen and Ted Hughes.

The verses themselves are all somewhat bizarre in different ways. Some well known to us adults, but I imagine that as a kid hearing any of them for the first time could really make you laugh. Some really are proper laugh out loud funny and others just plain odd; yet in a good way. All are illustrated in the bright and colourful style that so many Ladybird books had in the late 70s and early 80s. Certainly when you look at them today they appear very much of their time in a lovely retro way.

What books like Comic and Curious Verse do remind me of though is just how good it is to read poetry, and stories, aloud to children. To let them hear words. To let them hear the rhyming and rhythm. To let them hear the person reading it laughing with them. To see how reading something out loud can be a performance, even if there is only one person in the audience. I know children are often read to in class, but I guess as parents we don’t really see that. Instead we’re just more used to the cosy bedtime stories that we share with our kids. If anything, lockdown has taught me not to restrict reading aloud to the kids just to bedtime.

Ladybird Tuesday – A Ladybird Book of Musical Instruments

May 4, 2020 by penny Leave a Comment

With plenty of lockdown home-schooling going on here I feel so fortunate for my huge collection of vintage Ladybird books. With only one laptop between two school age kids, there have been plenty of occasions where I’ve needed a second information source that isn’t screen based. Luckily my Ladybird collection covers most subjects in enough details that it fill an information gap caused by not being able to access google. That’s certainly what happened with A Ladybird Book of Musical Instruments.

Ladybird Tuesday - A Ladybird Book of Musical Instruments Cover

My 9 year old (Year 5) daughter’s music homework the other week was to think about the four different sections in an orchestra (strings woodwind, brass and percussion) and try to list all the different musical instruments in each one.

She made a first stab with knowledge that she’d picked up from school, but after that drew a bit of a blank. I could fill in a few more gaps, but it’s over 20 years since I last played in a school orchestra and so I too couldn’t remember everything. No problem once I’d laid my hands on this book.

Ladybird Tuesday - A Ladybird Book of Musical Instruments

A Ladybird Book of Musical Instruments starts by explaining how we hear sounds, and a little bit of biology about the human ear. It then goes on to talk about how wound are generated in wind and stringed instruments, before going on to talk about all the different instruments in those categories.

As well as talking about the physical attributes of each instrument, the book also talks about the sounds they make and the styles of music that are most often played with them.

Ladybird Tuesday - A Ladybird Book of Musical Instruments - orchestra diagram

After using the diagram of where everyone in an orchestra sits to do the first part of her homework she then went on to read about all the instruments. The final part was listening to Peter and the Wolf and trying to identify the instruments used in each section. Thanks to the book she was a musical expert by the end.

Ladybird to the rescue for this particular bit of homework, although I’m not sure that when the book was first published in 1966 they ever imagined it being used in a situation like this one!

Ladybird Tuesday is a regular feature here on Penny Reads where I delve into my Ladybird book collection and choose a title to share with my readers. The weekly series originally started on my old blog, Being Mrs C, and this post originally appeared on there. I’m now in the process of moving all those posts over to Penny Reads and also adding titles that I have acquired since then. A list is currently being compiled here of all the titles I have in my collection.

Ladybird Tuesday – Florence Nightingale

April 25, 2020 by penny Leave a Comment

Ladybird Tuesday has had to take a bit of a backseat since lockdown began here in the UK. My Ladybird collection has been incredibly useful in helping me to home school the kids, but in terms of making time to write blog posts, things have been a bit more difficult!

It seems somewhat appropriate right now to start our Ladybird homeschooling journey with the nurse that all the new NHS field hospitals are being names after – Florence Nightingale.

Now, the name Florence Nightingale was already incredibly familiar to loads of people even before this pandemic, but how much do you really know about her? Yes, I could say that she often went by the name of “the Lady with the Lamp”, but that was roughly were my knowledge petered out.

I don’t pretend that the Florence Nightingale book from the Adventures from History series (series 561) is the authoritative guide on the woman, but it is definitely a good starting point, especially for children. It was published as the 7th title in this series, which possibly shows just how important a figure in history she was considered to be back in 1959 when this series was originally published.

Born in Florence, Italy (hence her name) in 1820 Florence’s father was a rich man who returned to England when she was still small. She was. solemn little girl whose favourite game was to pretend that her dolls were sick, and to nurse them back to health. It’s no surprise then that she went on to become a nurse. But, back then nursing was not seen as a profession that a girl from a “good background” should go into, and Florence had to fight to be allowed to go to Germany and Paris to study nursing, which only happened when she was 30.

The Crimean War in 1854 was when Florence went from “just” being a nurse to being probably the most famous nurse there ever was.

Not only was she a nurse, but also a leader and a very determined woman. After hearing how British troops were suffering compared to the French after being injured she responded for a call to go out and nurse the troops. The rest, as they say, is history.

As with so many of the titles in the Adventures in History series, Florence Nightingale gives an excellent first introduction to both the Lady with the Lamp, and also the Crimean War and the change of attitudes to nursing troops injured on the front line. It certainly here in 2020 gives children an excellent insight into why the new NHS hospitals are being named after her.

If you’re looking for a modern book on Florence Nightingale for you children then there is a great selection available on Amazon here. There are also various titles suited to adult readers who want to learn a bit more about her.

Disclaimer: This post contains a couple of Amazon affiliate links marked with a *. If you click on these and buy something from Amazon I receive a small commission, but it will cost you no more than usual. Many thanks for any purchases that you make.