Ladybird? As in Peter and Jane, Pat the dog and children dressed in neck-ties spending hours making a crappy pair of stilts out of two flowerpots and a few string?
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The Ladybird Book Of The Hipster.
There are eight books in the “Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups” series, which was created to help adults understand the world about them, according to Michael Joseph, the imprint of Penguin publishing the books.
Although they traditionally publish children’s books, Ladybird is releasing eight tongue-in-cheek advice books for adults this November, dealing with everything from dating and mid-life crises to husbands and sheds.
‘When we’re young we wonder if we’ll be a surgeon or an astronaut. We can be anything we want to be. Then one day we can’t.
At first glance, it may seem that little has changed, as the short books still use original artwork from the Ladybird archive – something author Joel Morris, who helped write the new books, admits was a bit of a challenge.
Illustrations of bearded, pipe-smoking men and women with immaculate hair appear alongside the large, simple script, which Hazeley has described as “light and silly and funny”. “As a kid you felt a bit special being given one”, said Mr Morris.
Peter and Jane, the original companions for young readers, have also gone in the new books, which include The Ladybird Book of the Mid-Life Crisis; The Ladybird Book of Dating and the Ladybird Book of the Hangover.
Brooker said: “This is such a good idea I’m now experiencing all the physical sensations of anger because I didn’t think of it, whereas Jason and Joel did”. “It’s hard to find commercial illustrators of that calibre any more”.
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The new titles will feature the original Ladybird artwork – it was too diffucult to source illustrations of binge drinking and Tinder dates – but with the captions rewritten for comic effect.
