A passion for puffins
Jun. 12th, 2007 09:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustIf I have a totem animal, it's probably the puffin. Seeing puffins on Inner Farne was the highlight of last year's trip to Lindisfarne.
But before I ever met puffins in real life, I was hooked on the books (there's a reason for that icon, you know).
The juvenile imprint of Penguin Books was the staple of my childhood reading, cheap enough that a birthday present was not one but several books, good enough that I'd enjoy a decent proportion of them (I'd read practically anything, but this was a bonus). By the time I was an undergraduate, with money of my own to spend, I was a member of the Puffin club, and knew which day of the month the new Puffins were published: and every month there would be one or two I wanted. Then came the "choose your own adventure" books, and things went downhill. Kaye Webb retired, which may not be entirely coincidental.
But there were still plenty of second hand Puffins to collect. The very earliest volumes tended to the didactic: children of long ago, children of far away, lives of great men, lives of wild animals - this is a reductive description, true but misleading: many of these books have charm, and some of them are as entertaining reading as you could ask for. It was in a Puffin book (No Other White Men by Julia Davis) that I first encountered the story of Lewis and Clark. Other early Puffins are children's classics: Alice, A Child's Garden of Verses and another star of my own childhood, J.B.S. Haldane's My Friend Mr Leakey, which may not be a classic, but should be (if you don't know him, read A Day in the Life of a Magician online). Gradually I realised that I had a respectable number of the first Puffin issues - not all in their first editions, by any means, but early enough to carry their "PS" (Puffin Storybook) numbers instead of the later ISBN. It dawned on me that I was now collecting the first hundred Puffins, and I had better sort out what I have and what I still need.
So I have been cataloging my Puffins, checking for gaps and for duplicates, scrutinising the back covers for lists of "other books you may enjoy" in order to draw up a full list of titles. (Somewhere along this process I was lured into Librarything - but that's a whole nother story, especially as I seem to have broken it).
I had assumed that the puffin icon would appear on the front cover of each book, and was surprised to find this wasn't the case: not only does the style of the puffin drawing depend on the period, it is sometimes absent altogether, sometimes worked into the cover design, and sometimes - like the standard bearer shown here - moved to the back cover. The 1950 reprint of PS 47, R.J. McGregor's The Young Detectives has a cover by William Grimmond showing the two children looking out of a cave at a rocky shoreline; behind them, the author's name appears on a piece of driftwood. On the back cover, an almost realistic puffin peches on a rock and gazes out to sea. You got serious design values for your one shilling and sixpence in those days.
But before I ever met puffins in real life, I was hooked on the books (there's a reason for that icon, you know).
The juvenile imprint of Penguin Books was the staple of my childhood reading, cheap enough that a birthday present was not one but several books, good enough that I'd enjoy a decent proportion of them (I'd read practically anything, but this was a bonus). By the time I was an undergraduate, with money of my own to spend, I was a member of the Puffin club, and knew which day of the month the new Puffins were published: and every month there would be one or two I wanted. Then came the "choose your own adventure" books, and things went downhill. Kaye Webb retired, which may not be entirely coincidental.But there were still plenty of second hand Puffins to collect. The very earliest volumes tended to the didactic: children of long ago, children of far away, lives of great men, lives of wild animals - this is a reductive description, true but misleading: many of these books have charm, and some of them are as entertaining reading as you could ask for. It was in a Puffin book (No Other White Men by Julia Davis) that I first encountered the story of Lewis and Clark. Other early Puffins are children's classics: Alice, A Child's Garden of Verses and another star of my own childhood, J.B.S. Haldane's My Friend Mr Leakey, which may not be a classic, but should be (if you don't know him, read A Day in the Life of a Magician online). Gradually I realised that I had a respectable number of the first Puffin issues - not all in their first editions, by any means, but early enough to carry their "PS" (Puffin Storybook) numbers instead of the later ISBN. It dawned on me that I was now collecting the first hundred Puffins, and I had better sort out what I have and what I still need.
So I have been cataloging my Puffins, checking for gaps and for duplicates, scrutinising the back covers for lists of "other books you may enjoy" in order to draw up a full list of titles. (Somewhere along this process I was lured into Librarything - but that's a whole nother story, especially as I seem to have broken it).
I had assumed that the puffin icon would appear on the front cover of each book, and was surprised to find this wasn't the case: not only does the style of the puffin drawing depend on the period, it is sometimes absent altogether, sometimes worked into the cover design, and sometimes - like the standard bearer shown here - moved to the back cover. The 1950 reprint of PS 47, R.J. McGregor's The Young Detectives has a cover by William Grimmond showing the two children looking out of a cave at a rocky shoreline; behind them, the author's name appears on a piece of driftwood. On the back cover, an almost realistic puffin peches on a rock and gazes out to sea. You got serious design values for your one shilling and sixpence in those days.
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no subject
Date: 2007-06-12 09:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 09:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 11:52 am (UTC)Revenge of the Wrought-Iron Flamingos takes place at a US war of independence reconstructors event, while Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon takes place in a Games software company, so you can see that Donna Andrews has knocked about with fandom-types! Murder with Puffins does have puffins, but isn't really as focused or as funny as some of the others.
Lil (waiting with bated breath for the paperback of No Nest for the Wicket, out in a couple of weeks)
[NB: the detective in Donna's other, more serious, series of novels is an AI...]
no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 08:12 am (UTC)I'm on yr bukshlf, incresing yr litrcy.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-13 09:56 am (UTC)Hee!