Well loved tales

I pride myself in being open to new technologies (with the usual caveat, for my age and gender). I use my smartphone to organise my travel, pay bills, and track my exercise. My kindle app contains a well stocked library, ranging from academic articles, cookery books, to cheesy midlife romances. I am active on all the usual suspects in social media, and I think they can be extraordinary tools for sharing ideas, in the same way that coffee houses were in the 18th century.

https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2016/12/01/before-facebook-was-the-coffee-house/

But there are some types of reading where paper surely has the edge, and one of these is reading to a child, because it allows you to relive some of your own early reading pleasures (and naturally, the more dog-eared and coffee stained the book, the higher the affective value). Recently with my grandson I have been rereading the same children’s stories I read to his father and uncle.  Yesterday I dug out an Alfie book by Shirley Hughes, and my 31 year old son immediately sought out his favourite illustration from it.

No doubt when the time comes we will read Roald Dahl’s ‘Boy’ and I will almost certainly cry at the page when he receives the last letter from his mother. This has become a family tradition.

But what has really excited me recently is coming across in various second hand book shops the slim hard backed Ladybird readers of the 1960s. The other day I heard a mother reading the Magic Porridge Pot to her child in the doctors surgery and I was struck by the beauty of the illustrations and storytelling of those early readers. The real classics are written by Vera Southgate and now I am on a mission to build up a collection. How can the cartoonish illustrations of today compare with this evocative frontispiece of Rapunzel and the prince’s beautifully peaked hat?