The Wonderful World of Ladybird Books for Grown-Ups (Ladybirds for Grown-Ups)

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The Ladybird Book of The Meeting, by J.A. Hazeley and J.P. Morris, is one in a series of Ladybird books for grown-ups written to help them cope with the world around them. My daughter gave it to my husband on Fathers’ Day and it is the only book he has successfully finished reading this year. This probably says something about shortening attention spans in our modern world, or maybe just about him. But Ladybird’s self-satire isn’t the first of its kind. In 2014, London artist Miriam Elia poked fun at the Peter and Jane books. “ We Go to the Gallery” sees Peter and Jane brilliantly recreated, with Mummy taking the two children on a trip to a contemporary art space. Highlights include: Hazeley and Morris said they decided to use original illustrations of previous Ladybird books and to “write as if we were time travellers from the 1960s looking at stuff such as online dating and nightclubs”. But it was the Key Words Reading Scheme, which brought siblings Peter and Jane to primary schools in the 1960s, that opened the floodgates to the new retro spoofs – and it wasn’t the idea of Ladybird’s own publisher, Penguin Random House, but of an artist provocateur, Miriam Elia.

When we’re young we wonder if we’ll be a surgeon or an astronaut. We can be anything we want to be. Then one day we can’t. Now, I love Ladybird books – and I love a good spoof. So I really wanted to like the four review copies kindly provided by Ladybird HQ. For which I am grateful, I really am. But I just can’t bring myself to like them. For what it's worth, the books in this series are published in the U.K. as "Ladybirds for Grown-Ups". The "Fireside Grown-Up Guides" are now starting to be published in the U.S. by Simon & Schuster, and are fairly faithful adaptations. Either way you can find them, as Ladybirds or as Fireside Grown-Up Guides, these books are a hoot.

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But he is keener on the Penguin Experts. “I think they’re an entirely different beast. They look like great access points to complex subjects from some brilliant writers.” This is what the inside of Tim’s head looks like. It also contains pictures of ladies before they have put their clothes on. He told the Independent he wanted to help adults make sense of the world, just as the classic books had helped children through the decades understand how locomotives and computers work. Where these books differ from the old Ladybird series for younger readers is that the tone of the text is sardonic and, for the most part, sarcastic. The authors clearly have some experience of meetings and didn’t much enjoy it, and that comes across wonderfully here. Indeed, it’s the particular meetings that I have direct experience of that made me laugh the most, particularly the one about the self-employed person.

This delightful book is the latest in the series of Ladybird books which have been specially planned to help grown-ups with the world about them.

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It’s quite remarkable how much information is contained in one small book. As well as the above, this book delves into the impact of different meeting spaces, appropriate catering, workplace diversity and the importance of structure to achieve the best results from a meeting. Not to be outdone, they had Hazeley and Morris create a series of spoof Ladybird books just for Penguin. Depressing comedy They had several copies of Joshua Harris's " I Kissed Dating Goodbye." Like... at least 4. And they were in several random places throughout the section.