Letterforms and Layout: Designing factual books for children

About this event

Letterforms and Layout: Designing factual books for children

17 May, 12-1pm

Professor Sue Walker, Professor of Typography at the University of Reading.

The middle decades of the twentieth century saw changes in the appearance of factual books for children—a move towards greater flexibility in the integration of text and image, and the use of visually exciting and child-centric content. This illustrated talk discusses Ladybird Books in the context of what was a lively and imaginative publishing scene.

Sue Walker is Professor of Typography at the University of Reading. She has published widely on book design for childrens’ reading, and on information design history, theory and practice. She is a passionate advocate for collections-based research, and is currently working on a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council that is looking at how illustrations from books produced in the 1940s and 1950s can be repurposed for use in teaching science in primary schools.

This series of  MERL Seminars: ‘Looking at Ladybird Books‘ is part of the events programme inspired by Ladybird Books: ‘How it Works’, a new exhibition hosted at Reading Museum as part of Museums Partnership Reading, a new cultural initiative funded by Arts Council England. The exhibition presents material from the extensive Ladybird Books Archive housed in the Special Collections at the University of Reading.

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