A box of them sells as one lot
Children’s annuals and Ladybird books come out of nearly every house clearance, and they sell in quantity rather than one at a time. Bonhams sold about 136 Ladybird books, largely from the 1960s for £125 including the buyer’s premium at its Oxford rooms on 26 November 2013, which works out at under a pound a book. Sixteen Dandy and Beano annuals of 1950 to 1957 made £312.50 in the same sale, about £20 a volume. Neither figure is a hammer price, and the hammer behind each is lower by the premium the buyer paid, which the auctions guide sets out.
Three kinds of volume earn a look before the rest of the box goes, and the tests for them are below.
Why so many of them survive
Ladybird books were made in Loughborough by Wills and Hepworth, a printing firm that produced its first children’s books in about 1914 and kept printing them in the town until 1999. The Leicestershire museum collection dates the classic Ladybird format to 1940, and the archive at the University of Reading records what that format was: 56 pages in full colour, printed from a single sheet of 40 by 30 inches, the size a printer calls a quad crown. One shape fitted every title, which made the books cheap to produce, and Reading records that the price held at 2 shillings 6 pence from 1940 until the 1970s.
The print runs followed from that. Ladybird’s education arm puts sales of Key Words with Peter and Jane, written by William Murray and first published in 1964, at over 100 million books. The annuals ran on the same scale, and the clearest measure of it is the 1973 Rupert annual, of which about half a million copies went out in a single year.
Dating a Beano or Dandy annual
Beano and Dandy annuals were published in July or August for the Christmas trade, and the cover carried no year at all until the mid 1960s, from which point it shows the year after the one it was printed in. An annual catalogued as 1940 was published in August 1939, and nothing on the book says so. Bonhams catalogued every volume in that 16-book lot with its year in square brackets, which is how a cataloguer records a date a book does not state.
The title on the book is what places an undated one, within a band.
| Title on the book | Annuals it covers |
|---|---|
| The Dandy Monster Comic | 1939 to 1952 |
| The Dandy Book | 1953 to 2002 |
| The Dandy Annual | 2003 onwards |
| The Beano Book | 1940 to 1942 |
| The Magic-Beano Book | 1943 to 1950 |
| The Beano Book | 1951 to 2002 |
| The Beano Annual | 2003 onwards |
The Bonhams lot fixes the boundaries that matter, holding Dandy Monster Comics of 1950 to 1952 against Dandy Books of 1953 to 1957, and a Magic-Beano Book of 1950. Published lists of the Beano bands differ by a year at the edges, so a volume at a boundary belongs to either side of it until something else dates it.
The Beano Book title covers two bands sixty years apart and narrows nothing by itself. Magic-Beano is the one title that fixes a short band: it borrowed the name of the Magic Comic, which paper rationing closed in 1941, and it puts the annual between 1943 and 1950.
The 1973 Rupert annual with a brown face
Rupert’s adventures began in the Daily Express in 1920, drawn by Mary Tourtel, and Alfred Bestall took the strip on in the 1930s. A Rupert annual goes by the year it was issued rather than the year after it, so the one at issue here was printed in 1973 and is known as the 1973 annual.
Bestall painted Rupert with a brown face on the annual covers while the bear stayed white inside the book. In 1973, after a dozen brown-faced copies had been printed, the paper’s editor stopped the presses and changed the front cover to a white face without consulting him. Bestall never drew another Rupert cover. About half a million white-faced copies went out against those twelve, and the auctioneer Chris Albury, cataloguing one at Dominic Winter in 2010, said four of the twelve had come to light.
The brown face counts on the 1973 cover alone. Bestall drew every earlier cover the same way, so a brown face on an annual of the 1950s or 1960s is the ordinary thing and settles nothing. A brown-faced 1973 cover goes to a specialist before it goes anywhere else.
What a cataloguer writes down, and what it takes off
Christie’s sold 72 volumes of Rupert annuals covering 1936 to 2002 on 16 November 2004, with 40 further Rupert items in the same lot, against an estimate of £2,000 to £3,000. It realised £3,346. The run carried the first annual of 1936 in what the catalogue calls its rare dust jacket, which is the scarcest single thing in a Rupert collection.
That same lot carried a facsimile of the 1936 annual, numbered as one of fifty, and the first Dandy annual was reprinted as a facsimile in a collector’s slipcase in 2006. Read the imprint before deciding a 1930s annual is as old as it looks.
The faults the Christie’s catalogue lists are the ones to look for in any box of annuals: pictures coloured in, six of the Magic Painting editions of the 1960s coloured or partly coloured, ownership pages filled in in pencil or ink, the price clipped from three volumes, tape repairs and split joints. A Magic Painting annual that has been painted has lost the thing it was made for. The value guide grades condition and puts a clipped jacket at a discount of a quarter to a third.
What a shelf of Ladybird books is worth
Every Ladybird title in the classic format carries a series number, printed on the book, and the series rather than the title is how they are collected. A complete series in clean covers is the thing a buyer wants; a mixed reading shelf of the 1960s and 1970s is the £125 for 136 books at the top of this page, which is the figure to expect for most of them.
Dating one by its price is weaker than it looks. The 2 shillings 6 pence above held from 1940 until the 1970s, so a pre-decimal price brackets a book across more than thirty years, and a price in new pence puts it after February 1971. The series number and the list of other titles printed with the book narrow a date further than the price does.
The three that come out of the box
- Any Rupert annual issued in 1973. Look at the front cover: a brown face is one of twelve, a white face one of half a million.
- A Rupert annual of the 1930s or 1940s, the first of 1936 above all, and above all in its dust jacket, once a facsimile has been ruled out.
- The earliest Dandy and Beano annuals. The Dandy Monster Comic title runs back to the first of them in 1939 and the Magic-Beano Book to 1943, and those two titles are what identify a pre-1951 annual when the cover gives no year.
The rest travels as quantity. A book saleroom charges a higher rate on a carton than on a single volume and sets a minimum on every lot, so breaking annuals into small lots costs the seller money rather than earning it, as how to sell old books works through at published rates. Keep those three out of the carton and let the remainder go as one line in the catalogue. The books section covers the first editions worth separating from the same shelf.
