Peter Lunn: Children's Publisher: The Books, Authors and Illustrators

Citation

Ray, S. (2011), "Peter Lunn: Children's Publisher: The Books, Authors and Illustrators", Library Review, Vol. 60 No. 1, pp. 88-90. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242531111100649

Peter Lunn (Publishers) Ltd was launched by a German émigré, David Gottlieb, began trading in 1943 and went into liquidation in October 1948. It published 117 books and at least 30 were in progress when the company folded. David Gottlieb was born in Germany in 1916 and moved to Britain during the 1930s. A born entrepreneur, there seems to have to have been plenty of family money to support his various enterprises. The company published both original texts and new editions of classics, anthologies of stories, and volumes of fairy tales, for which it commissioned fresh illustrators.

The author of Peter Lunn, Peter Main, is a longtime collector of children's books and this illustrated bibliography is clearly a labour of love. It is well produced and organised. The introduction and a history of the firm are followed by the descriptive bibliography, in which the books are arranged in order of publication. There are separate lists of the authors and illustrators, each arranged alphabetically. The books that the company intended to publish but which were victims of the closure are also listed. There is a good index and each book is given a distinctive number that makes the finding of specific information fairly simple.

As I was a child and an avid reader at the time the firm was in existence, I would have expected to remember seeing and reading some of the books that Peter Lunn published but although one or two of the book covers (these constitute most of the illustrations) and some of the names are familiar, I cannot honestly recall any of them clearly, nor do I remember coming across them after I became a librarian in 1952, when some of them might still have been in stock. Perhaps, the marketing and publicity were at fault and this may account for the early demise of Peter Lunn, publisher. However, the firm launched and encouraged the careers of several authors and illustrators who were later very successful. Robin Jacques (born 1920) and William Stobbs (born 1914) are good examples of the illustrators whose early work was published by the firm – William Stobbs won the Kate Greenaway Medal and books by both Jacques and Stobbs were an important contribution to the “second golden age” of children's literature from the mid‐1950s to the late 1970s.

The Peter Lunn books, their content and production, are very much of their period – whoever decided what books they would publish clearly recognised the nature of the potential market. Books are categorised as classics, fairy tales, adventure, nature, educational or picture books. The classics include Robinson Crusoe and Pinocchio. The fairy tales are drawn from various sources – Hans Andersen and the Grimm brothers amongst others. The cover of Joseph Avrach's The Ginger Gang, showing five children, looks if it could be an adventure story by Enid Blyton who was publishing many of her best‐known series in the 1940s. Stories about horses, an increasingly popular topic in the 1940s, are categorised as “nature” and Peter Lunn used Authors and illustrators already well known in this field, such as Lionel Edwards, who produced illustrations for a new edition of Black Beauty. The “educational” books cover a wide range, including biographies, such as David Wood's Cook the Explorer.

Two picture books, Sylvia Norton's The Magic Zoo and Joseph Avrach's Peter the Sailor, also reflect themes popular with children at the time. Avrach, a Polish Jew who, like Gottlieb, came to Britain in the 1930s, did quite a lot of work for the company, writing and illustrating two books, writing six others and illustrating six more, including The Magic Zoo. He seems to have sunk without trace but some of the writers and illustrators that Peter Lunn used did great things elsewhere. Jo Manton, Author of The Story of Titania and Oberon, a picture book based on A Midsummer Night's Dream, produced many biographies for children.

John Keir Cross had joined the BBC in 1937 as a writer and producer of radio and in the 1940s his career as a writer really took off. Writing under his real name and as Stephen Macfarlane, he produced 14 or 15 books for Peter Lunn, and he became very well known as both a writer and broadcaster. His wife, Audrey Blair, a Radio Actress, wrote The Sampler Story for the firm – and it was the listing of this that made me wish that Peter Main had told us more about some of the books he so carefully describes. His book provides a very enjoyable browsing experience as well as being a useful source of information about publishing and children's literature, but one needs to know something about the subject already and be able to read between the lines in order to appreciate it fully.