Bookworm
Page 26
What-a-Mess series
Babar the Elephant
Babar’s Travels
Dogger
Meg and Mog series
Mr Men series
The Birth of Illustrated Children’s Books
Der Struwwelpeter (Shockheaded Peter)
Orbis Sensualium Pictus
A New Lottery Book of Birds and Beasts for children to learn their letters by
A History of British Birds
Songs of Innocence
This is the House that Jack Built
Sing a Song of Sixpence
Beauty and the Beast
The Baby’s Opera
The Baby’s Bouquet: A Fresh Bunch of Old Rhymes and Tunes
The Diverting History of John Gilpin
Under the Window
Mother Goose
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
International Companion Encyclopaedia of Children’s Literature
Sendak
Where the Wild Things Are
Church Mice series
A Hole is to Dig
Kenny’s Window
Very Far Away
The Sign on Rosie’s Door
Nutshell Library
Higglety-Pigglety Pop
In the Night Kitchen
Outside Over There
Spot the Dog
2. To The Library
Dr Seuss
There’s Going to Be a Baby
The New Small Person
King Baby
Topsy and Tim’s New Brother
Understanding Dogs
Lake Wobegon Days
The Cat in the Hat
Why Johnny Can’t Read
Dick and Jane series
Peter and Jane series
Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?
Blake – Burningham – Scarry – Briggs
The Enormous Crocodile
Patrick
A Drink of Water
Mouse Trouble
The Telling Line
Borka: The Adventures of a Goose with No Feathers
Come Away From the Water, Shirley
Time to Get Out of the Bath, Shirley
Would You Rather …
School
Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady
Father Christmas
Fungus the Bogeyman
When the Wind Blows
3. Now I am Six
Plop
My Naughty Little Sister series
The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark
Les Livres, Les Enfants et Les Hommes
The Gruffalo
Teddy Robinson and Mildred Hubble
Teddy Robinson Goes to the Fair
The Worst Witch
Ginnie
Lucy
Lucy Runs Away
Tottie: The Story of a Doll’s House
Tottie And Milly
The Doll’s House
Milly-Molly-Mandy series
The Wombles
Adventures of Purl and Plain
The School Carousel
Happy Families series, including:
Master Bun the Bakers’ Boy
Mrs Wobble the Waitress
Mr Tick the Teacher
Mr Cosmo the Conjuror
Adventuring with Brindle
Maggie Gumption
Flat Stanley
Henry and Ribsy
A Girl from Yamhill
Beezus and Ramona
Ramona’s World
Ramona and Her Mother
Ladybirds
Napoleon Bonaparte
John Wesley
Book of Printing Processes
The Computer: How it Works
Gulliver’s Travels
The Swiss Family Robinson
Stone Soup!
Our Land in the Making
The Ladybird Book of the Hipster
The Gingerbread Man
Dahl
The Magic Finger
Fantastic Mr Fox
James and the Giant Peach
George’s Marvellous Medicine
The Twits
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Danny the Champion of the World
The Witches
The BFG
Matilda
The Bears’ Bazaar
A Giant Book of Fantastic Facts
It’s Not the End of the World, Danny
4. The Blyton Interregnum
Five on a Secret Trail
Five Run Away Together
Come to the Circus!
Six Cousins at Mistletoe Farm
Children of Willow Farm
The Sea of Adventure
The Little Black Doll
Autumn Term
5. Through a Wardrobe
The London Child
The Family from One End Street
The Hobbit
Further Adventures of the Family from One End Street
Holiday at the Dew Drop Inn
The Borrowers
Lord of the Rings
Narnia
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
The Last Battle
Surprised by Joy
The Magician’s Nephew
Prince Caspian
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Silver Chair
The Horse and His Boy
A Tale of The Tale of Troy
The Tale of Troy
King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Pearl in the Myddes
The Saga of Asgard
Streatfeild
Ballet Shoes
Curtain Up
White Boots
Jackie Gets a Pony
Jackie and the Pony Thieves
A Pony for Jean
Jill’s Gymkhana
Jill Has Two Ponies
Out With Romany
The Phoenix and the Carpet
The Horse in Sickness and in Health
6. Grandmothers & Little Women
Sam Silvan’s Sacrifice: The Story of Two Fatherless Boys
A Book for Boys and Girls/ Divine Emblems; or Temporal Things Spiritualised
A Token for Children: being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths, of Several Young Children
Divine and Moral Songs for Children
A Little Pretty Pocket Book
The Governess
Fabulous Histories (later History of the Robins)
The History of the Fairchild Family: The Child’s Manual, being a collection of stories calculated to show the importance and effects of a religious education
The King of the Golden River
Tales from Shakespeare
Holiday House
Anne of Green Gables
Classics
Winnie the Pooh
7. Wonderlands
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret Garden
Little Lord Fauntleroy
That Lass o’ Lowrie’s
A Little Princess
E. Nesbit
The Treasure Seekers
The Railway Children
Twain – Coolidge – Montgomery
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
What Katy Did
What Katy Did Next
School
8. Happy Golden Years
Puffin
Stig of the Dump
Charlotte’s Web
Stuart Little
Trumpet of the Swan
Tollbooths And Gardens
The Starlight Barking
The Hundred and One Dalmatians
The Phantom Tollbooth
Tom’s Midnight Garden
Goodnight Mister Tom
Goodnight Mister Tom
Private – Keep Out!
Private – Keep Out!
William – Melendy – Fr
isby
Just William
William the Lawless
The Saturdays
The Four-Story Mistake
Then There Were Five
Spiderweb for Two
Thimble Summer
Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
School Stories
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
Eric, or Little by Little
Fifth Form at St Dominic’s
Stalky & Co.
The Fortunes of Philippa
Rosaly’s New School
The Senior Prefect (later Dimsie Goes to School)
Chalet School series
9. Darkness Rising
Secondary School and, Not Unrelatedly, Dystopia
Tripods series
The Changes series
Brother in Land
Z for Zachariah
End of Term
Watership Down
Autumn Term
The Cricket Term
Attic Term
Falconer’s Lure
The Marlows and the Traitor
Runaway Home
Peter’s Room
The Ready-Made Family
The Library
Sugar Mouse
The Lily Pickle Band Book
10. A Coming of Age
Fireweed
The Trouble with Donovan Croft
Break in the Sun
Running Scared
A Pair of Jesus Boots
A Pair of Desert Wellies
Bridge to Terabithia
Dicey’s Song
Hangin’ Out With Ceci
The Pinballs
The Cybil War
The Eighteenth Emergency
The Cartoonist
SVH
Sweet Valley High series
Taking Sides
Perfect Shot
Wrong Kind of Girl
Perfect Summer
BLUME
Blue Above the Chimneys
Twopence to Cross the Mersey
Boy Trouble at Trebizon
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
Draw Me a Star
I Saw Esau
Deenie, Blubber, Tiger Eyes
Then Again Maybe I Won’t
Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself
Forever …
Twilight series
The Best Little Girl in the World
I’m Kissing As Fast As I Can
Grow Up, Cupid
Geek Girl series
Summer of My German Soldier
Summer of My German Soldier
I Capture the Castle
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
@vintagebooks
penguin.co.uk/vintage
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781448191222
Version 1.0
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
VINTAGE
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Text copyright © Lucy Mangan 2018
Cover illustration © Laura Barrett
Lucy Mangan has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Square Peg in 2018
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
1: The Very Hungry Reader
fn1 I warm also to the story of how she once spent hours entertaining children at a book fair in the north of England by drawing dozens and dozens of pictures for them in thick black felt tip. ‘Now,’ she said at the end of her Stakhanovite stint, ‘any questions?’ One little boy put up his hand. ‘Yes, Miss,’ he said. ‘Where’s tha’ colours?’
fn2 I feel for this woman. I can’t tell you how long I tried to make Alexander enjoy Graham Oakley’s Church Mice books. ‘They’re so dryly witty! Such deft characterisation! Who doesn’t know an Arthur? And isn’t there a little of Sampson the cat, his instinctive urges forever poised to undo all the good of his early training, in all of us? The whole series captures the gentle stoicism of the Anglican church like nothing else!’ I used to cry, until the day I realised Alexander was a) two and b) asleep.
2: To The Library
fn1 At least one was, in fact – Topsy and Tim’s New Brother came out in 1975. And in 1992 they had a New Baby. Their parents should be studied by science.
fn2 I could have lined a small shelter with mine already. I had just been given my very own bookcase to house them all. I have it still. It’s in my study – white, about four feet tall by three and a half feet wide with four shelves of increasing depth as you go down; fortifying in every sense.
3: Now I am Six
fn1 I don’t wish to brag, but I have met Teddy Robinson. Yeah, the real one. And Deborah. She is now in her mid-sixties and living in the same house in Hampstead as she did as a child and in which her mother set the books. She showed me the original drawings for the books and some of the unused ones. I actually held unseen bits of Teddy Robinson’s life in my hands. I lifted his purple dress too, out of his little suitcase, and then I had to excuse myself and nip to the loo for a small cry. Yes I are a fool.
fn2 Oh. My sister did. ‘We went there on a number of Mangan Magical Mystery Tours,’ she says. It was a mistake, overall, to let her read this before publication. She is upsetting me.
fn3 Meanwhile, I am greatly enjoying the pastiche series. The page in The Ladybird Book of The Hipster – ‘Hipsters think plates are very old-fashioned. They prefer to eat from planks, tiles and first-generation iPads. This tofu self-identifying cross-species is being served on a spring-loaded folder that contains the script of a short film about a skateboarding shoelace designer’, alongside the picture from The Gingerbread Man of him on a baking tray – is the only thing that can still make me laugh sober.
fn4 Just as everyone has ‘their’ James Bond or Doctor Who, so everyone has ‘their’ edition of favourite childhood books. For anyone who like me came of Dahl-reading age in the mid-1970s to late 1980s, Jaques is the illustrator of ‘our’ Charlie. She always grounded her drawings in reality and amassed (for this was before the Internetz, children) a collection of 15,000 pictures of clothes, food, faces, architecture, plants, animals, games and everything in between to help her research. That’s why her squirrels looks so squirrelly, Charlie looks so starving and the gum machine – monochrome inside the book, but with glorious green metalwork and multicoloured pipes on the cover – really looks like it might work. AND she was a compulsive reader who loved to be alone and kept cats because they were the only pets that allowed her to be both. I could not love her more. She also illustrated possibly my favourite children’s book of all time, Private – Keep Out, and its two sequels. BUT WE’LL GET TO THAT.
4: The Blyton Interregnum
fn1 They may not come, of course. Some children pick her up, do not like her and put her down again. These are generally clever, sensitive children who are more or less born ready for literature and for whom an absence of psychological realism and complexity is both baffling and frustrating rather than soothing or relaxing. I think my son – who is currently trying to burst a balloon with his teeth – will have his Enid Blyton years.
fn2 Which I did not see. I was four in 1978 when the Famous Five adaptation began, and in those days, children, if you missed something on TV even by a day, an hour or
a minute, let alone five or six years, that was it. No iPlayer, no YouTube, no Netflix, no second chances, that was it. You were done. Oh, the past was cruel. But – fun fact for you! – the actor who played Dick in the Famous Five series also played Lord Edward Dark in the Dark Towers serial which was part of the BBC’s Look and Read series that had Wordy teaching us all about Magic E! Pleasing, no?
5: Through a Wardrobe
fn1 The rule is that I don’t read fairy tales. ‘But that is completely – and I mean completely – stupid!’ I hear you cry. ‘Are you a full idiot, or what?’ To which I can only say – I know, I’m sorry, and yes, probably. I have tried to break my self-imposed embargo many times over my reading career, with various Andrew Lang collections, and Grimm treasuries, and Hans Christian Andersen compilations but it has never worked. Beyond Ladybird age, everything that had recommended them suddenly became infuriating. I was never again seized by the elemental simplicities, the eternal truths enshrined by enduring symbols and archetypes. I just got frustrated by the lack of detail, the implausibility, the unrealism. Instead of evoking a sense of wonder and limitless possibility, they just left me wanting more. Maybe I never had the imagination that should rush in to fill the gaps. Maybe I started my degeneration into the awful, literal, unromantic, cynical, canker-hearted beast I have become earlier than I ever suspected. I feel similarly about short stories now. If you’ve got a good idea and a plot, give me more! Give me all of it! I am aware that this is to miss the point of short stories entirely. Being a bookworm does not necessarily mean being a good reader.