Ladybird Tuesday: William Tell

Ladybird Tuesday again - as I've said, I like both the illustrations and the philosophy - cheap yet generally good quality books available to the masses. It's quite nice to see a recent surge in interest of these books, even if they're a wee bit flawed.

Mention the name William Tell and the two things you'll likely think of are the overture by Rossini or the image of a man being forced to shoot an arrow through an apple on his son's head. However, the story of William Tell is essentially the Swiss answer to Robin Hood, a folk legend of how the Swiss people, led by folk-hero and bowman Tell, rebelled against their Austrian occupiers and came to form what became Switzerland. Indeed, the apple incident occurred after Tell refused to bow to a despot Austria governor's demand to bow to the governor's hat atop a pole in a village square. As a do-or-die punishment, Tell has to shoot an apple off his own son's head, and as a good bowman manages to save his son's life as well as his own.

Ladybird Tuesday: Gulliver's Travels

I haven't done one of these Ladybird Tuesday things for some time, so I thought I'd have another go. On a recent trip to an antiquarian book shop, I came across some older Ladybird books from the 1970s. Given how cheap they were (under £3), I picked up a couple, including this one, an adaptation of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels dated from 1976. Flicking through the pages, I vaguely remember this book from when I was younger but it didn't have the same cover. On the back it is listed as being part of Series 770 (I wonder why a publish would label and market each of their series with a number, but anyway...). According to a quick bit of research is a series of retellings of classics, legends and fables. I like the cover of this book - a nice break from the now clichéd image of Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputian army.