A Pleasant Surprise by Mary Mayfield

A fascinating revisitation of a childhood book from Mary Mayfield. It raises interesting questions about what is suitable for children, and whether some older ideas would get published today. Thanks Mary for letting me share this!



Toby and his Little Dog Tan or the Great Detective of Fairy-land.


Written by Gilbert James and illustrated by Chas Pears.



"This is one of my mother's favourite books from her childhood, in the 1920s. The hero, Toby, is woken in the night by a little red man come to summon him to help retrieve the stolen pearls of the Queen of Fairyland. He is transported, through a badgers' set and along an underground river, to meet the Fairy Queen and then off, via the bad fairies town and an escape on a stork's back,
meeting a variety of talking animals along the way, to track down the thief, rescue the pearls and prevent wolves invading England.

I've always found it be a terrifying book. My mother tried to persuade me how wonderful it was but I was frightened by the illustrations, particularly the little red men.
When, years later, she's tried to get my daughters to read it, I've always said "Don't. It's horrible".
So, I went to find it, intent on sharing with you the horrors of early 20th century children's literature and was amazed to discover that the writing is actually quite funny. It starts by describing Toby as a very clever boy but adding "His teacher did not think so but then she wore eye glasses".
The little red man explains to Toby that when the Queen's pearls are lost or stolen "all the fairies get stupid, and cross, and sleepy". "I suppose" said Toby, "you are stupid though you don't seem cross, or - but you do look crosser now than you did before"
Later on, little dog Tan is trying to sniff out a field mouse "and putting his nose in the air and waving it - his nose I mean - of course, he could not wave the air, at least, I don't think he could, but one never knows"

Some of the illustrations I'm sure would never find their way into a modern children's book. The little red men still look like devils to me, even after all these years, and the picture of Toby, armed with a pick-axe, and Tan fighting the fox is bloodthirsty.
Even so, I'm really pleased to have gone back to this book and eventually enjoyed it - thanks to James and his Dusty Old Books."

Mary Mayfield

The Story of Ferdinand

I'm sure many people are familiar with this children's classic - the first book about "pacifism" I ever read - but I hate the thought of anyone missing out, so just in case... here it is. The story, by Munro Leaf is deceptively simple and begins: "Once upon a time in Spain..."







What follows is a beautifully shaped fable with superb drawings by Robert Lawson, and was first published in 1936. Ferdinand is not like other bulls. They all butt their heads and fight. But Ferdinand prefers to sit in the pasture under his favourite cork tree and just smell the flowers. As he grows older his mother worries - but "even though she was a cow" (cue much hilarity) eventually understands her calf is happy.

One day the other bulls are showing off to impress the matadors, hoping to be picked for the bull fight.


However when Ferdinand accidently sits on a bee, the matadors misinterpret his apparent wildness and take him away to Madrid, where "all the lovely ladies have flowers in their hair..."

Astonishingly, the book was banned in Spain and Nazi Germany as subversive, yet the conclusion is as touching and tender as Ferdinand himself - but I won't give it away just in case this little gem has slipped through your literary net. If so, seek it out and fall under it's kindly spell. My copy may be dusty and old and falling apart, but it has been reprinted many times and I hope it is still in print!

Nebula to Man

Possibly the maddest book in my collection, this is a Darwinesque narrative poem describing the scientific progress on earth from it's creation through to early man. It takes 450 pages of rhyme and many Edwardian illustrators to get us to "Modern times". The chapters are all accurately and sequentially titled after the various eras: Triassic, Jurassic, Cretacious etc. I would have loved this as a child, and the highly literal and representational images of prehistoric life are very simular to those in Arthur Mee's Encyclopaedias, if any of you are old enough to remember those. They were part of my child-hood.




"But life on land persues a chequered course,
As Law holds on its way, without remorse."


I couldn't put it better myself.









Published by J.M. Dent in 1905 this is (understandably) a first edition and is disarmigly didactic and cheerfully inaccurate ; the dinosaurs would not pass muster today. It reminds me of the magnificent Victorian concrete dinosaurs at Crystal Palace Gardens, with horns-on-noses where there should be none, and the bi-ped dinosaurs slithering on all fours. Science (and what publishers are looking for) has moved on, not always to mankind's benefit, alas. I wonder how the twentieth century would be mapped out in narrative verse, as an appendix to this mighty volume?

The provenence is interesting too - it's from a library of a Spiritualist Society in Essex which housed Conan-Doyle's library. When my parents ran a second-hand book shop they were invited to clear out unwanted books. I went along to help and fell in love with this Nebula. It was a strange experience: obviously we felt scrutinised, being amongst mediums in a large Agatha Christie style mansion. In fact the Society was extremely pleasant and welcoming. Nevertheless, I half expected the ghost of Margaret Rutherford (who my grandmother once met in Kew Gardens; she was utterly enchanting by all accounts) to appear and admonish us for taking the books. As ABBA's Fernando played on their radio we discovered that anything they did not agree with had been "edited" with scissors... but the Nebula was intact. Many books had book-plates declaring them the personal property of Conan-Doyle, and Sherlock Holmes fans gave my parents a very good price for them.

Nebula to Man is probably a worthless book, having no apparent Conan-Doyle link. But to a once dinosaur-mad kid it was the most fascinating and bizarre book in the entire library. I love it. It's mad, it's ridiculous, the rhymes don't even scan. But I know it will never end up on an ereader!

Saviour Pirotta: Things that Kindle can't do yet - part two

Saviour Pirotta has written a Lovely personal collection of thoughts and memories, tied together by books:

"James blogged about tatty tv tie in DUSTY OLD BOOKS a while ago. It set me thinking about another thing [in fact, two things] that Kindle can't do yet, and probably never will.

My parents were not the sort to waste hard-earned cash on pressies. They weren't alone. No one I knew when I was a kid ever received gifts, not ones wrapped up in wrapping paper and decorated with ribbons and a gift tag anyway. We all got a bag of fruit and nuts for St. Martin's Day in October, lucky money from grandma for New Year and - if we'd behaved 365 days out of 356 - a gelato for our name Saint's day. [Mine is St Saviour's Day in mid-July, so gelato was a real cool treat]

One Christmas eve, though, my brothers and I all got dressed in our Sunday best and we took the bus to town. My eldest brother was starting secondary school and dad had decided he needed a geometry set. While at the stationer's cum bookshop cum lotto office cum rosary bead seller's, my father was suddenly struck down with a momentary lapse in meanness. He said we could all choose something from the shop.

My brother Lino picked a double pack of card games: Snap and Old Maid. I made a dive for the bookshelves. Now up to that point I only had four books in my precious book collection, mainly because my parents disapproved of any tome that did not have Nihil Obstat printed on the title page. Nihil Obstat is Latin for No Objection, which meant the church had not found anything in the book that might corrupt a susceptible mind.

The oldest book I had was a Victorian copy of Kingsley's The Water Babies. It had belonged to my great aunt Agnes, who'd very diligently drawn and coloured in swimming cossies on all the naked water babies combing the rock pools in the ocean. I also had two Ladybird books, one about the Holy Land and another about the USA, where my great aunt had worked as a nanny for a young couple in Hollywood. And I also had - although no one in the house knew about it - a tattered copy of Enid Blyton's The Happy House Children, which I'd nicked from the English RAF family next door just before they left for their new assignment in Hong Kong. This was easily my favourite book so, needing to grab something before my dad regained his senses, I picked The Mountain of Adventure. It was an Armada paperback, and the pride and joy of my collection for years.

Now some time after this, I bumped into the novelist Nicholas Monsarrat [as one does] vainly trying to get water out of a roadside pump the local kids had vandalised. We got talking and he told me that one of the most precious moments in an author's life occurs when he receives a parcel containing advance copies of his latest book. From then on, I used to waste a lot of time wrapping my beloved copy of The Mountain of Adventure in brown paper and pretending I was Mrs Blyton savouring that precious author moment of laying eyes on her latest book for the first time.

Imagine my confusion then, dear blog reader, when years later I walked into the library at my secondary school for the first time and realised that the copy of The Mountain of Adventure my heroine Enid lovingly caressed at that sacred moment of authorship might not have been an Armada paperback like mine, but a hardback book, with a dust jacket and a completely different picture on the cover. What was going on?

The librarian, a very kind jesuit whose patience would be tested to the limit in the five years I was at that college explained the concept of different EDITIONS to me. Major novels, he said, were issued in hardback first, for the cognoscenti who collected books. There might be different editions for book clubs, and different covers to suit the tastes of the English-reading public in various British colonies. If the book proved popular, there would be a paperback editon. And if the novel was made into a film, there would be a tie-in. Some books have had hundreds of different editions, especially the classics that have been around for a long time.

Which brings me, in a very roundabout and self-absorbed way, to my first objection about Kindle. What about different editions? Kindle might issue books with a screengrab for a cover, very much like the kind of artwork you get when you download a song on iTunes. But would that be enough to entice a new reader, to make him want to go back to the novel time and and time again? I don't think so. Book lovers will always want beautiful editions, and that's why I for one will not be forking out for an ereader.

PS: My second objection? You can't really give an ebook for a present. How can you wrap it? What would you put under the Christmas tree, the token, a print-out of the receipt? Bah! Humbug?"

Saviour Pirotta

Thanks, Saviour, for permission to post this on the blog!

Bilibin and Rimsky

Just for Doda, a little more Ivan Bilibin. Undoubtedly one of the great illustrators, he also found fame as a designer of sets and costumes, especially for operas. Russian operas are so often developed from folk and fairy tales, or at least thoroughly Russian subjects, and so this was an deal niche for him to explore. Of all Russian composers it was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov who proved his perfect inspiration. Here a vintage Leningrad-published book all about the Kirov opera and ballet (now renamed the Mariinsky of St Petersburg)has some fascinating evidence of Bilibin's work in practise. The end papers are in fact based on Alexander Golovine's famous curtain at the exquisite theatre (Golovine preceeded Bilibin as set designer, collaborating with Korovin and Bakst). But the black and white photographs, poor though they are, show early productions of two Rimsky-Korsakov operas that Bilibin cast his spell over: Rimsky's masterpiece, Kitezh (my favourite opera)and The Tale of Tsar Saltan (see my earlier post on Bilibin). Just click to enlarge.

Even in these murky photos his brilliant ability to use space, his decorative obsessions, the order and structure of folk art and icons, all show through. If only I had a time machine...

The other little book is a real curio, a lovely biography of Rimsky-Korsakov, a misunderstood and much maligned composer of operatic fairy tales. I believe he is an under-rated genius, who isn't fashionably tormented like his colleagues Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky, but instead expressed himself quite differently, introsopectively and with splendid dignity. A devoted family man his tragedy was more private. He lost two beloved children in infancy and can it be entirely a coincedental that this most pantheistic of composers favoured stories of snowmaidens and water sprites who can never grow up and find love? Instead they perish, melt, become rivers or - at best (like the heroine Fevronya in Kitezh) - meet their lovers in the afterlife.

All of this inspired the greatest things from Bilibin, so it is quite appropriate that the little glued plate on the cover of the biography should be one of his drawings: a costume for a boyar from Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tsar's Bride.

Tatty TV Tie-ins

You find them everywhere: junk shops, charity shops, car boot sales. And the frisson of recognition and memory is powerful to anyone of a certain age. In the 1970s there was a surge of classic children's book adaptations: Heidi, The Secret Garden, The Railway Children... it was a golden age. I know it continued into the 80s, but then, sadly it slowly began it's tragic decline. Anne of Green Gables was especially popular in our house. To this day my sister and I call our mother "Marilla". Kim Braden (now, what became of her?) was perfect...and I mean perfect... as Anne Shirley, the temperamental orphan in search of a kindred spirit. The BBC films were made around Constable Country I believe, in Suffolk, which made a very credible Prince Edward Island. So much of L.M. Montgomery's invented mythology entered our lives and however good the newer Canadian films are (and Megan Follows is superb as Anne), these earlier films - the first series I believe irretrievably lost or damaged (and certainly never issued on DVD) - captured an innocence and tenderness that was surprisingly memorable. I suppose they must have left "plenty of scope for the imagination" as Anne would have said. And I confess to a bit of a crush on Ms. Braden...
The other TV tie in here is a simular vintage but from Australia, bought in by the BBC. I can only assume it is likewise lost as no DVD seems to exist, which is a great pity as I remember it so vividly I can still sing the theme tune. Seven Little Australians is a haunting and ultimately tragic story of an Australian family, set at the end of the 19th century. A classic "down under" it doesn't seem as well know in Britain. It's a little sentimental, as one might expect, but powerful nontheless, and a few hints of E. Nesbit and indeed Montgomery.
That these memories, filled with the sound of tea cups and the smell of Battenburg and the promise of Mr Kipling, as we settled down as a whole family to watch the tea-time classic serial, can be held by a tatty TV tie-in is remarkable. There are more handsome editions of both books out there. But none that mean more to me. Custard Cream anyone?

Saviour Pirotta: Things that Kindle can't do yet...

From Saviour Pirotta comes a lovely collection of things found inside books. Thanks, Saviour for permission to post!



"In a comment in his wonderful blog DUSTY OLD BOOKS, James Mayhew observed, Just this weekend in a sunday newspaper a journalist was saying how she was looking forward to "not having a dusty pile of books beside the bed". And I thought: I LOVE my pile of dusty books beside the bed, finding lost books, finding books I didn't know I had, finding letters or pressed flowers inside, inscriptions and postcards; memories of a previous reading in another place. All this quite apart from illustrations and the actual words intended by the author!


It made me think of the ephemera I have left in my books over the years:



train and bus tickets from journeys in other countries;
paper napkins with bar logos;
restaurant bills from special meals, messages out of fortune cookies, theatre and concert tickets, notes from meetings with editors, party invitations, even sweet and chocolate wrappers.

Who will find them when my books pass into new hands?

And will their new owners pause to think about the person who placed them there?

Will they try to imagine what I looked like, what I thought of the meals I had eaten, the shows I had seen, the places I visited?

I certainly treasure the things I find in old books. I think of them as the bookmarks of someone else's life.

Sometimes, just for fun, I try to make up stories about them, imagining different ways how, why and when they ended up in these books?


Here are a few things I have discovered nestling between yellowed pages over the years.

What do you make of them?"


Saviour Pirotta.

More from Mr Mayfield.

Very many thanks to Gerry for another great story about his own collection of dusty old books... Enjoy!

"These 2 books are special to me for slightly different reasons.

The first is Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. I have an admission to make about this book, which I shall come to later. I received it when in hospital at the age of 7.

I spent quite a few periods in hospital around the time and to be in hospital for my seventh birthday was especially depressing for me.




But to my joy I received this book as a present from the nursing staff on the ward. At the age of seven it was beyond my reading ability, but non the less I was delighted and treasured it. I later went through a phase of liking the plainness of the single colour of the boards on the books and removed it's flysheet for it never to be replaced. Because it was past my reading age, it went on a shelf and was, in part, forgotten for many years. Much later I did try to read it, and here is the admission, but... I found the attitude of Defoe (and probably his contemporaries) towards non white peoples to be offensive and could not bring myself to actually finish it. Perhaps a shame and I may yet try again but... I still treasure the book as a mark of the nurses' kindness.

The other book 'Tales of Brave Adventure' was also one of the first books I 'owned'. I had 4 brothers and so got to 'own' very little. I received things passed down and was, in turn, expected to pass them along. But this book was mine, for none to share. A selfish attitude perhaps, but also a little island in a big sea. I was given this book by a neighbour for caring for their cat while they were on holiday when I was about 8. I treasure this for the ownership of it where everything else disappeared and deteriorated through others neglect. It may be a little tatty now, but it is nearly 50 years old."

Gerry Mayfield

Seeing London

One of my very favourite children's books is this out-of-print gem by an American called Dale Maxey. A voluminous Red Elephant with roller skates is a symbol for a London bus, and takes a pair of children on a thorough and in-depth tour of our capital city. There are too many pages to show you here. But the disarmingly naive maps (with my infant scribbles) and the whale in the Natural History Museum are typical. I remember vividly my first trip to the big city. Coming from Suffolk it was A Big Event, and although I was only 3 or 4, I still can picture the big Blue Whale. Of course it is still there...and I have seen it many times since... but I remember that first visit and throwing a coin on it's tail from the balcony.


Then there's the museum of London with the Fire Of London panorama, also embedded in my memory and included in the book. As I grew older I would "collect" memories of my visits to the places in this book, which was an ideal souvenir of them, and educational too, with the ornate signs on Lombard Street revealed (are they still there?) and the whispering gallery of St Paul's remembered. It would be hard to reprint this book as I daresay it is hopelessly out of date (but no more so than the fashionably retro This Is London by Miroslav Sasek, recently republished). But I love it for the smoky 1960's Chim-Chim-Charoo atmosphere of a grey London, still with soot and rain and hidden secrets.

Saviour Pirotta: Treasures rescued, treasures lost...

A beautifully written and rather tragic tale from the brilliant Saviour Pirotta:

"A few weeks I was on my way to the bakery round the corner when I caught sight of a pile of old books overflowing out of a skip. At first I thought someone had dumped a boxful on top of the detritus you usually find on skips. A quick poke in the debris and I discovered it was actually the other way round. The skip was full of books and someone had plonked a few bits of broken furniture on top. There must have been a few thousand volumes in there. Dozens of students from Shipley College up the road were milling around the skip, their eyes glued on their mobile phones. None felt in the least bit compelled to have a poked around.

I popped into the newsagents’ nearby. Did they know were the books had come from? It turned out that the place next door had been a second hand bookshop. It had closed a few months before I’d moved to the village. The owner, a taciturn historian, had suffered a stroke and, unable to operate the business, had closed it down but refused to relinquish the lease back to the council. Apparently he had lived the last years of his life alone with his books, unable to sell on the stock and unwilling to part with it for free. Now that he was gone, workmen had been sent in to clear and fumigate the place before a new business took it on.

Where were the books going? I enquired. Surely, they weren’t just going to be dumped in a landfill site like so much worthless rubbish? It seemed they were. No one wanted them. No school, no college, not even a dealer could be found to offer them sanctuary. I texted a quick SOS to some friends, book lovers like me, who surely would come to the rescue? One of them owned a shop selling vintage memorabilia; she might find some of the books a new home and make a bit of a profit in the bargain.

The best went a long time ago, came back the reply from the only person who bothered answering. Only rubbish left. Don’t bother.

I delved in to see what the rubbish was. A 60s compendium of JM Synge’s plays! It included The Playboy of the Western World and Riders to the Sea, a brilliant one-act play! How could scripts like that be classed as rubbish? I also found a Nelson edition of John Buchan’s Greenmantle, its red cover slightly faded but still in good condition! And several copies of those Pan Books of Horror I used to treasure in the 70s, but which went to my brother when he married! A woman in a spotted kaftan ambled across the road. What kinds of books was she interested in? I asked. There were all sorts in here. She didn’t want any of the books on the skip, as it turned out. They might be mildewed, for heaven’s sake! What she was after was the bookcase she’d spotted from half way up the hill. A good clean and it would be as good as new for her doll collection, she reckoned.

I helped her dig out the bookcase but we soon attracted the attention of a young community liaison officer. Did we know that it was a criminal offence to dig around in skips, without the express permission of the owner? I knew it would be futile to explain that the owner of the books was too dead and cremated to give his permission. The woman in the kaftan and I both scuttled away, me carrying an armful of rescued books, the woman carrying the bookcase on one shoulder, like a female Jesus bearing his cross.

That night, I returned to the crime scene, but the skip had been replaced by a near-empty one. No books in it; they’d been taken to the landfill site. But I did rescue a lovely wooden box that seemed to have once held jars of ink or paint. It’s sitting in my shed at the moment, waiting for a free moment when I can clean it up and give it a good lick of linseed oil to bring out the grain.

I can’t bear to think about the books I didn’t manage to rescue are, though. Would the taciturn historian be watching over them from wherever he is? And, as they slowly disintegrated in the rain and the frost, their precious words erased forever by the elements, would he be shedding an afterlife tear at the dawning of an age when his beloved books count for so little? I hope so, for as I look at my own books, safe on their shelves for at least as long as I live, I am reminded of thought provoking line from Cleopatra. As Elizabeth Taylor in the title role watches the flames engulf the once famous library of Alexandria, she screams at Caesar: Neither you nor any other barbarian has the right to destroy one human thought!"

Thanks to Saviour Pirotta for permission to post his story.

from Mary Mayfield...

Beloved books from Mary Mayfield. Thanks so much for sending these pictures and sharing the story behind the books. I love a bit of embossed gold as well...

"Granddad's Books
These are very special books to me as they belonged to my mother's father who died a few years before I was born. By trade, he was an engine driver working for Barber & Walker pits on their private railways around Eastwood, Nottinghamshire; by the time of WW2 he was in charge of running their goods depot. In his spare time, he grew mushrooms which were sent down to Covent Garden market, built his own wooden-framed caravan, travelled around on his motorbikes and experimented in what must have been cutting-edge technology - building a succession of radios and, ultimately in 1939, built a television set - the first person in the village to have one!
Back to the books - a series of 12 classic novels from Odhams Press dating to the 30's and a four part "Gardening for Amateurs" from Waverley Book Company from the 20's. There were a couple more of his books which have disappeared (I remember a book titled "Your Fate in the Stars") but not many as ours wasn't a household full of books.These two sets of books though were looked after by my Grandmother, perhaps as mementoes for I don't ever remember her reading them - in fact I think I was the only person interested in their contents.They are all well used books - not falling apart but it's obvious that they have been read or referred to more than once but this must have been only by Granddad. As a child I thought they must be incredibly dull as they were always kept wrapped in brown paper to protect their covers and, although I claimed them as a teenager, I was never allowed to remove it.Only after I married and moved them to a new home did the covers come off."

Mary Mayfield

The Illustrated Book...with a difference

This book caught my wife's eye because of my love of music. Imagine our surprise to discover that the rather sentimental prose was accompanied not by distinctly average engravings, as first appeared to be the case, but by hundreds of incredibly fine HAND DRAWN illustrations, put directly onto the page of this bound book.


By whom? The author? Someone who loved the book so much they couldn't resist? Perhaps a lover of the author?

The romantic possibilities are endless. For this reason I cherish the book. Someone must have loved it so much to have wanted to create the best drawings they could muster, and in abundance. There are over a hundred of them. I can think of very few people who, in our digital age, would bother to see something like this through. It makes the book an exceptionally personal and intimate item, as in a way all books can be. It is not a great book nor one I read from often. Rather, it is a unique and curious object that I leaf through and wonder about from time to time. I think the idiosyncraties of the published form are endlessly fascinating, and the stories they further create in my mind are valuable and cherished.
The words within are all linked to music by Mendelsohn, Verdi, Wagner and other Romantic composers. Extracts from their music is quoted throughout, and the books has sections called "largo" and "allegro".

The book is copyrighted 1898 and produced by the Knickerbocker Press New York. This is not a first edition but one of many reprints. And yet, with these many drawings it is surely unique!

Old Man River

Forgotten, misunderstood, neglected, much maligned. Here is a man who did as much as Martin Luther King, but whose political views resulted in appalling abuse during the McCarthy witchhunts in America. For he was accused of being a Communist. As so often, my love of something - or someone - comes from a childhood memory, which is that of my father playing Paul Robeson's records. I have since collected many original 78 rpm records, and they are some of my most cherished things. This little book is not a biography. It is a statement. A personal explanation of Mr Robeson's views and reasons. It is a rebuff to those Americans who turned against him. And it is a sensitive and deeply moving insight into the racism and segregation suffered by black Americans in the 20th century.Perhaps Mr Robeson was naive. His reception in the Soviet Union and his observations of racial equality cast a long shadow on his homeland. Certainly the principles of a communist ideal must have been attractive. The reality was somewhat different and he in no way endorsed what Stalin did. Indeed he never joined the Communist party as such, but spoke out against racism so passionately - and used the Soviet system as an example of an alternative - that post-war America became nervous.

He was adored in Britain and celebrated all over the world. Back in American he and his audiences were - incredibly - stoned, leading to riots. He was dragged through courts, humiliated, stripped of his dignity and refused his passport. At the height of his career as a singer and actor (he played Othello to great acclaim in London), he was imprisoned in his own country. Today he isn't really celebrated as he should be. He risked everything for his people and I adore this book as it contains such humanity, such courage and emotion. He was a great speaker and a fine, good man. He paved the way for President Obama. But I don't believe this is a book that will ever turn up on Kindle...

"To be free - to walk the good American earth as equal citizens, to live without fear, to enjoy the fruits of our toil, to give our children every opportunity in life - that dream which we have held so long in our hearts is today the destiny we hold in our hands." PAUL ROBESON: HERE I STAND.

Train spotting

Like a lot of boys I grew up loving trains. Proper trains... steam trains. I adored these Little Red Engine books by Diana Ross (I'm guessing that's not the Disco Diva...but who knows?). Certainly I much preferred them to Thomas the Tank Engine and co. Originally they had illustrations by Lewitt-Him, about whom I know nothing, except I love the design and order of the illustrations. Later books were illustrated in a very simular vein by Leslie Wood, and these books have been reissued. But Lewitt-Him's have not which is a shame. In any case the originals, with colour separation, lithographic covers are so much more beautiful than full colour modern covers, as is the matt paper within. I especially love the cover underneath the dustwrapper of Leslie Wood's illustration (bottom picture), just gorgeously simple. In the stories, which take me right back to home and my childhood, the Little Red Engine has remarkably straightforward adventures: In The Little Red Engine gets a name (which I think is possibly the first book in the series) he carries the King on the main line. "And then they came to a tunnel, the first it had ever been through. It took a deep breath: WHOOOOEEEEEOOOOO!" To a train mad kid that was poetry! His reward is to be named "Royal Red" by Special appointment to His Majesty the King. Quite right too!