posted on 18 May 2022

The mystery of the unidentified children’s books

Every now and again when we’re out book hunting we stumble on something we’ve never seen before – and that we’re unlikely to see again in a hurry. It’s both exciting and frustrating when you come across books that have no author, no publishing details and carry no evidence of when they were produced  - exciting because these are almost always made to be ephemeral and yet they’ve survived; frustrating because however much trawling of the internet you do turns up no evidence of where they’ve come from.

So it is with the five colourful and oddly shaped little booklet stories that are pictured here. The booklets are titled Molly the Motorist, Mischievous Mike, Mary Ann, The Gay Pierrette and Piggie’s Cruise and only the last of these titles has any identification on it. Piggie’s Cruise  has ‘B.B. Ltd 920/9 Printed in England’ on the back card cover but this turns out to be no more than useless given that there are now and have been lots of B.B. Ltd printers spread across the country.

The booklets are around 8” tall and 4” wide with colourful front and back printing on the card cover and inside there are 10 pages on rough, low quality paper also in colour and black & white. The ‘story’ is in verse – written in excruciating rhyming couplets – and has little or no literary quality and no immediately obvious message or purpose other than to be mildly diverting.

Although the booklets seem to have a Twenties or Thirties aesthetic about them, I’m willing to bet they actually produced in the 50s or 60s as a nostalgic confection of some kind. I can’t help but feel they have the look of something that was given away as a freebie with something else at one time – but that’s just a guess on my part.

However, anonymous though they are, there’s really no doubting their visual appeal – they are delightful survivors. These are exactly the sort of publication that has little chance of surviving in the child’s toy box. If they don’t fall foul of a heavy-handed young reader, they stand little chance of avoiding being binned by parents clearing out unwanted toys and books once their child has grown up. Quite where these examples were stored to avoid such a fate is probably a more interesting story than those told inside the covers.

If anyone has the answer to what these are and who produced them, I’d love to hear and maybe I can begin to fill in the missing history.

 

Terry Potter

April 2022