THE MAKING OF 'A LADYBIRD BOOK ABOUT DONALD TRUMP'
from September 2019
Since 2015, book festivals have invited us along to chat about our range of Ladybird Books For Grown-Ups. After our talk (always the last item at the festival; we are the ‘and finally’ rollerskating duck news item in the literary running order) we would throw open the room for questions and every time we would be asked two things: When are you going to do one about Brexit? How about one about Donald Trump?
The answer was that we weren’t. Brexit wasn’t funny – too divisive -- and Trump was impossible; there were 15,000 images in the Ladybird archive from which we drew our vintage illustrations, but nobody in human history has ever looked like that.
Also there was the issue of politics. Our books have a much-loved beetle in the corner of the cover. We’re not parody Ladybird books, we’re actual Ladybird books. Nobody wants to stir a spoonful of bitter satire into sweet childhood memories.
In 2018 the series was being wound up, having covered every corner of grown-up experience that could comfortably fill a pocket pastiche book, from Hipsters to Boxing Day. But at a drink to toast the success of the range, we mentioned to our editor that we might have stumbled upon a way to actually pull off a Ladybird Brexit book.
We knew that the Ladybird Books For Grown Ups joke worked best when jaunty images were matched with world-weary text. Everybody on both sides of the Brexit argument, several years in, had become exhausted beyond agitation; the perfect tone for a Grown-Ups book. Also the Brexit debate had been redefined as a tribal battle for the soul of an imagined Britain, and we had unprecedented access to a collection of nostalgic images of sunlit uplands and vintage certainty; a fantasy land that could be described as “the inside of Jacob Rees Mogg’s head”. A Brexit Ladybird book could blend nostalgia and knackeredness, and maybe that was the non-divisive joke we’d been looking for.
The Ladybird Story of Brexit turned out to be a surprise hit. We were initially concerned that our book might be overtaken by events, but at a research lunch with a prominent Brexit journalist, we were assured that despite the appearance of a frenzied news cycle, politics was actually trapped in a Groundhog Day stalemate. Sure enough, over a year later, the book is still selling, maybe because it remains a topical depiction of a nation attempting to achieve six impossible things before breakfast.
And that was that. But a few months later our editor sent us a mock-up of a Ladybird cover – something we occasionally did to entertain each other, trying out impossible titles (‘The Ladybird Book Of Mark Rylance’, ‘People At Work: The KLF’) that we all knew would never get off the drawing board. His cut-up had a fat, painterly orange on a plain background – a baby-friendly image from a First Words book. Above it, in stern block capitals, ‘The Ladybird Book of Donald Trump’. We replied with an email laugh, and forgot all about it. A week later our publicist messaged us: “Are you guys really doing that Trump book then?” We answered, slightly baffled, “Sorry. Was that email joke a commission?” Our editor came back, “Actually it was only a joke. But, hang on, let me ask the top brass at Ladybird.”
Maybe we could. The orange was very funny.
So we found ourselves doing the other book we said we would never do. Finding images turned out to be a matter of thinking laterally. After all, we’d done a book on dating despite the Ladybird illustration archive containing almost no modern adults without children in tow; with a bit of effort we could surely find Trumpian images of wealth, power and vulgarity. Towerblocks. Golden caskets. Oil pipelines. Golf courses. Ogres with piles of cash. We even dug up a handful of surprising almost-lookalikes, including a wonderful flyaway-haired figure alighting from a slick helicopter.
This time, however, the unexpected joke came from the text. Trump’s default mode of communication is the tweet. A Ladybird Grown-Ups page is about the same number of words, usually in monosyllables and duosyllables. The book spoke his language.
Our main problem was that Trump’s world was a lot nastier than Ladybird can usually support. Our books are pastiches, with an added shrug about the disappointments of adulthood, but we had always kept away from the sordid or plain unpleasant. We knew the internet was cluttered with Ladybird parodies, usually juxtaposing the bright, warm pictures with bad language and brash themes, but that was a joke we had deliberately avoided in our series. We always wanted to show our love of Ladybird books rather than drag them into the gutter for a laugh.
But Trump’s world, it turned out, was unavoidably nasty and brutish. Bullying, misogyny, corruption, racism, sexual coercion, vindictiveness, prejudice, anger, even simple mean-spiritedness sat poorly on the Ladybird page. Merely quoting the man directly could raise the hairs on the back of our necks. We had been worried about running the text past the lawyers, but we ended up self-censoring for the sake of the spirit of the books.
The best joke, we found, was to use the words you might use to talk to a child to explain the behaviour of another spoilt child. Kids comprehend Trump remarkably well. Ours certainly do. They’ve run into enough of his type since nursery.
In the end this Ladybird Book For Grown-Ups, the one we were worried would be too grown-up to work, is probably the only one our kids will understand. It might even be the Ladybird Book For Grown-Ups that’s closest to an actual Ladybird Book. After all, from the Ladybird history series to the Well-Loved Tales, they always wrote clearly and educationally about tyrants, baddies and monsters. It’s just one more to add to the list.
from September 2019
Since 2015, book festivals have invited us along to chat about our range of Ladybird Books For Grown-Ups. After our talk (always the last item at the festival; we are the ‘and finally’ rollerskating duck news item in the literary running order) we would throw open the room for questions and every time we would be asked two things: When are you going to do one about Brexit? How about one about Donald Trump?
The answer was that we weren’t. Brexit wasn’t funny – too divisive -- and Trump was impossible; there were 15,000 images in the Ladybird archive from which we drew our vintage illustrations, but nobody in human history has ever looked like that.
Also there was the issue of politics. Our books have a much-loved beetle in the corner of the cover. We’re not parody Ladybird books, we’re actual Ladybird books. Nobody wants to stir a spoonful of bitter satire into sweet childhood memories.
In 2018 the series was being wound up, having covered every corner of grown-up experience that could comfortably fill a pocket pastiche book, from Hipsters to Boxing Day. But at a drink to toast the success of the range, we mentioned to our editor that we might have stumbled upon a way to actually pull off a Ladybird Brexit book.
We knew that the Ladybird Books For Grown Ups joke worked best when jaunty images were matched with world-weary text. Everybody on both sides of the Brexit argument, several years in, had become exhausted beyond agitation; the perfect tone for a Grown-Ups book. Also the Brexit debate had been redefined as a tribal battle for the soul of an imagined Britain, and we had unprecedented access to a collection of nostalgic images of sunlit uplands and vintage certainty; a fantasy land that could be described as “the inside of Jacob Rees Mogg’s head”. A Brexit Ladybird book could blend nostalgia and knackeredness, and maybe that was the non-divisive joke we’d been looking for.
The Ladybird Story of Brexit turned out to be a surprise hit. We were initially concerned that our book might be overtaken by events, but at a research lunch with a prominent Brexit journalist, we were assured that despite the appearance of a frenzied news cycle, politics was actually trapped in a Groundhog Day stalemate. Sure enough, over a year later, the book is still selling, maybe because it remains a topical depiction of a nation attempting to achieve six impossible things before breakfast.
And that was that. But a few months later our editor sent us a mock-up of a Ladybird cover – something we occasionally did to entertain each other, trying out impossible titles (‘The Ladybird Book Of Mark Rylance’, ‘People At Work: The KLF’) that we all knew would never get off the drawing board. His cut-up had a fat, painterly orange on a plain background – a baby-friendly image from a First Words book. Above it, in stern block capitals, ‘The Ladybird Book of Donald Trump’. We replied with an email laugh, and forgot all about it. A week later our publicist messaged us: “Are you guys really doing that Trump book then?” We answered, slightly baffled, “Sorry. Was that email joke a commission?” Our editor came back, “Actually it was only a joke. But, hang on, let me ask the top brass at Ladybird.”
Maybe we could. The orange was very funny.
So we found ourselves doing the other book we said we would never do. Finding images turned out to be a matter of thinking laterally. After all, we’d done a book on dating despite the Ladybird illustration archive containing almost no modern adults without children in tow; with a bit of effort we could surely find Trumpian images of wealth, power and vulgarity. Towerblocks. Golden caskets. Oil pipelines. Golf courses. Ogres with piles of cash. We even dug up a handful of surprising almost-lookalikes, including a wonderful flyaway-haired figure alighting from a slick helicopter.
This time, however, the unexpected joke came from the text. Trump’s default mode of communication is the tweet. A Ladybird Grown-Ups page is about the same number of words, usually in monosyllables and duosyllables. The book spoke his language.
Our main problem was that Trump’s world was a lot nastier than Ladybird can usually support. Our books are pastiches, with an added shrug about the disappointments of adulthood, but we had always kept away from the sordid or plain unpleasant. We knew the internet was cluttered with Ladybird parodies, usually juxtaposing the bright, warm pictures with bad language and brash themes, but that was a joke we had deliberately avoided in our series. We always wanted to show our love of Ladybird books rather than drag them into the gutter for a laugh.
But Trump’s world, it turned out, was unavoidably nasty and brutish. Bullying, misogyny, corruption, racism, sexual coercion, vindictiveness, prejudice, anger, even simple mean-spiritedness sat poorly on the Ladybird page. Merely quoting the man directly could raise the hairs on the back of our necks. We had been worried about running the text past the lawyers, but we ended up self-censoring for the sake of the spirit of the books.
The best joke, we found, was to use the words you might use to talk to a child to explain the behaviour of another spoilt child. Kids comprehend Trump remarkably well. Ours certainly do. They’ve run into enough of his type since nursery.
In the end this Ladybird Book For Grown-Ups, the one we were worried would be too grown-up to work, is probably the only one our kids will understand. It might even be the Ladybird Book For Grown-Ups that’s closest to an actual Ladybird Book. After all, from the Ladybird history series to the Well-Loved Tales, they always wrote clearly and educationally about tyrants, baddies and monsters. It’s just one more to add to the list.