My love of book cover design has led me to pick up Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935 – 2005, an illustrated guide to the history of Penguin book covers, as found on a trendy coffee table near you. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘roald dahl’
Remembering Roald Dahl
Monday, September 13th, 2010Today, if you didn’t already know, is Roald Dahl day. Born on 13th September 1916, this wonderful children’s writer would now be 94 years old. 94! If his last full-length work is anything to go by (Matilda, published in 1988), the old man still had plenty of story-telling juice left in him by the time he passed away in 1990.
I have a huge personal investment in Dahl, as it was his books (and his wonderful, funny poetry) I was weaned on from a young age. Not unusually for a child growing up in the north of England in the 1980s, Dahl was the first author I fell in love with. I have strong memories of leafing through those slim paperbacks, finding myself wowed by Dahl’s vivid imagination and delighted by Quentin Blake‘s enchanting drawings (Dahl and Blake are utterly inseparable in my mind). I finished James and the Giant Peach and The BFG in two days each, The Witches in one. (more…)
