Dorothy Neal White<\/h1>\n
Newsletter 42<\/p>\n
April 2010<\/p>\n
\n
AGM<\/h3>\n
The Annual General Meeting held on 28 Wednesday April 2010<\/p>\n
Archives New Zealand Trainging Room (101 Mulgrave Street)<\/p>\n
6pm with drinks and nibbles from 5:30pm<\/p>\n
Philippa Werry, Wellington children\u2019s author, on the topic ‘A Writer’s Journey’.<\/p>\n
National Library building redevelopment<\/h3>\n
While the Library building is being redeveloped the Dorothy Neal White Collection is available on-site at the Archives New Zealand Reading Room, 101 Mulgrave Street, Wellington. To see books from the National Children\u2019s Collection you can visit the National Library Reading Room at 77 Thorndon Quay, Wellington. If you have registered as a client, you can request your books on-line to be available when you arrive. Otherwise, you will need to await the next batch delivery (usually every 1.5 hours). The NCC will also remain available for inter-library lending. For more information, please refer to the National Library web sitehttp:\/\/www.natlib.govt.nz\/about-us\/visiting-us<\/a><\/p>\n On 10 July 2009, Lynne Jackett retired from the position of Research Librarian. In the following months Linda McGregor ably undertook the responsibilities for the role. On 22 March 2010 Mary Skarott was appointed to the position on a one year secondment.<\/p>\n Introducing Mary Skarott<\/b><\/p>\n I am thrilled to have been appointed as Senior Research Librarian, Children\u2019s Literature. This position is a temporary one for the moment, until the end of January 2011.<\/p>\n I have worked at the National Library for 19 years, with a couple of breaks for parental leave during that time. My children are now aged 10 and 8, so this 20 hour a week position is ideal for me. Cataloguing has been the focus of my career so far, and much of my work has been with children\u2019s material from the National Children\u2019s Collection, Dorothy Neal White Collection, Schools Collection and Alexander Turnbull Library.<\/p>\n In my spare time I completed a Diploma in Children\u2019s Literature from Christchurch College of Education. My studies allowed me to look in depth at some of my areas of particular interest, including illustration and book design, the fantasy genre, and children\u2019s literature in the Victorian era.<\/p>\n It was a love of literature that originally drew me into librarianship. My parents both ran small branch libraries in England, and much of my school holiday time was spent reading in the children\u2019s corner while they worked. It is a real pleasure now to be able to work with and explore the Dorothy Neal White Collection and National Children\u2019s Collection from both a literary and research perspective. The more I delve into the collections, the longer my \u201cto read\u201d list becomes!<\/p>\n Mary Skarott<\/em><\/p>\n Lynne thanked friends and current and former colleagues for coming to help celebrate the end of her children’s literature career at the National Library.<\/p>\n My career that got off to a shaky start, as my avowed intention to focus on children’s books saw me declined entry to the Library School twice. However, stubbornness paid off and it was 3rd time lucky.<\/p>\n Mary Hutton, Mary Hall and Trevor Mowbray who were already in the School Library Service Head Office when I began there in early January 1977. I owe especial gratitude to Mary Hutton who taught me how to really look at a picture book and who put up with my sometimes erratic reviewing habits – most notably going a whole month just reading the books and leaving writing all the reviews to the last day.<\/p>\n I have appreciated the support of the Friends of the DNW Collection Committee during the last 15 years. I wish to acknowledge Susan Price, whose amazing generosity and passion for children’s books means that we have not 2, but 3 notable collections of children’s literature.<\/p>\n Thank you to all the cataloguers who have worked on the DNW and NCC down the years and to the Gallery and Conservation staff who made my displays and the Grimm Stuff<\/i> Exhibition look so good. And thank you to my current family, the group formerly known as Reference Services, and to friends across the Library here in Wellington and around the country.<\/p>\n It is customary to say that what you will miss most when you leave \u2013 what has made your workplace special \u2013 is the people, the people, the people. Well, don’t get me wrong \u2013 as I have said, I value many of you highly \u2013 but what I am going to miss most deeply is my daily interaction with the children’s books. Kipling’s description of Auckland in Song of the Cities<\/i> as “Last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart” pretty well describes how I feel about the National Children’s and DNW Collections \u2013 and their location within this building. They have been an important part of my life for 32 years, and it is hard to leave them.<\/p>\n There have been some lows among the highs – some restructurings, cessation of the early childhood reviewing journal The book corner<\/i> after 6 years, the media mess surrounding the book disposals when I was managing Collection Development, \u2013 but most of my working life has been happy. Highlights have included getting appointed to a job where I was paid to read and have opinions about books \u2013 too good to last, but it took 17 years for it to go! Editing The Book corner<\/i> was really rewarding, and, as I said, it was a real blow when it was axed. We kept getting requests for it for years, so the target audience appreciated it. I also found I really enjoyed policy development and the triennial challenge of the collection revaluation when I was managing Collection Development. More recently, being involved in the International Children’s Digital Library (including speaking at its launch in Washington, DC); being invited to speak about management of children’s collections in South Korea; and the Grimm Stuff<\/i> Exhibition have all provided a real buzz.<\/p>\n I have enjoyed my interactions with the researchers who have mined the collections looking for Kiwi iconography, Victorian adolescence, imperialsim, multiculturalism … and Noddy. One of my cherished encounters (and probably a demonstration of a than a less-than-ideal reference interview) was with a man seeking images of “traditional fairies” to inspire his cover art for a new edition of A midsummer nights dream<\/i>. I showed him pictures by Rackham, Mabel Lucie Attwell, Ida Rentoul Outhwaite and Ciceley Mary Barker, but none of them were quite what he wanted. He then showed me the work in progress \u2013 it seemed to have been inspired by Xena Warrior Princess, and none of the fairies in children’s books were that curvaceous!<\/p>\n So, how to actually say goodbye and thank you? Well, there’s a children’s book for every occasion, so to conclude I am going to read to you from George Speaks<\/i> by Dick King-Smith (Kestrel, 1988). To set the scene, George was born able to speak, but for most of his first year, only his older sister Laura knew that. This passage is at his first birthday party:<\/p>\n \u201cCome on, everyone!\u201d said the large jolly uncle. \u201cLet\u2019s sing Happy birthday!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cExcuse me,\u201d said Laura quickly. \u201cGeorge doesn\u2019t want the singing yet. He wants to eat first, and then, after he\u2019s cut the cake, you can sing.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, well!\u201d laughed the large jolly uncle. \u201cAnd the what happens?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThen,\u201d said Laura, \u201cGeorge speaks.\u201d<\/p>\n So they all ate, then George cut the cake, with Laura\u2019s help, and after that everyone sang, \u201cHappy birthday, dear George, Happy birthday to you.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSpeech!\u201d shouted the large jolly uncle, winking at the others.<\/p>\n Then Laura wiped a mixture of ice-cream and cake off George\u2019s face and took off his plastic bib, and George rapped with a spoon on the tray of his high-chair, and all fell silent.<\/p>\n \u201cLadies and gentlemen,\u201d said<\/p>\n \u201cI am delighted to welcome you here today, and trust you will forgive me if I remain seated. Standing up in a high-chair is, you will agree, a dangerous business.\u201d<\/p>\n He paused and looked round at the circle of astonished faces. The large jolly uncle gaped.<\/p>\n \u201cFirst,\u201d George went on, \u201cI should like to thank all of you for the gifts which you have brought. I am sure you meant well.<\/p>\n \u201cNext, I wish to thank my parents for the excellent meal which they have so kindly provided.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd thirdly, I want to take this opportunity to say how grateful I am to my sister Laura.\u201d<\/p>\n Laura blushed.<\/p>\n \u201cWithout her understanding, support and affection, \u201c George continued, \u201cthis past year would indeed have been a trying time for me.\u201d<\/p>\n He paused to take a sip of orange juice from his feeding-cup.<\/p>\n \u201cFor a long time now,\u201d he said, \u201cLaura has known of my personal good fortune, namely the possession of intelligence beyond my years. Or rather, I should have said, beyond my year<\/i>. Ha ha.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHa ha,\u201d said several voices nervously.<\/p>\n \u201cMore recently,\u201d said George, \u201cmy parents have also become aware that I am not, shall we say, as other babies are, but to the rest of you it may come as something of a shock. May I hope that the shock is not an unpleasant one. All of you are of course much older than myself, some\u201d (and he nodded politely towards the four grandparents) \u201cvery much older. You therefore have what I lack, namely experience of the world, and I look forward to many interesting discussions with you on a variety of subjects. And now, if you will forgive me, I must leave you. Sleep is important at my age, and it has been a tiring day.\u201d<\/p>\n George bent forward in his chair in a kind of bow.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce again,\u201d he said, \u201cthank you all for coming.\u201d<\/p>\n Lynne Jackett<\/i><\/p>\n Lynne with flowers from the Friends & Farewell card drawn by Ron Johnson<\/p>\n both photographs photographer Joan McCracken<\/p>\n Following the Annual General Meeting in April 2009, Lynne Jackett gave a slide presentation entitled A few of my favourite things<\/i>featuring books from the children\u2019s literature research collections of the National Library. Selected highlights are reproduced here:<\/p>\n Lessons for children, from two to three years old<\/i> by Mrs. Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743-1825) London : J. Johnson, 1782<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n This small volume is one of the oldest books in the Dorothy Neal White Collection. Mrs Barbauld had a successful writing career at a time when female professional writers were rare. She was an innovative children’s writer and her primers provided a model for pedagogy for more than a century. For the first time, the needs of the child reader were seriously considered.<\/p>\n Barbauld demanded that her books be printed in large type with wide margins so that children could easily read them and, even more importantly, she developed a style of \u201cinformal dialogue between parent and child\u201d that would dominate children\u2019s literature for a generation. In Lessons for Children<\/i>, a four-volume, age-adapted reading primer, Barbauld employs the conceit of a mother teaching her son. Many of the events in these stories were probably inspired by Barbauld\u2019s experience of teaching her own son, Charles.<\/p>\n A gamut and timetable in verse<\/i> by Charlotte Finch. London: Dean and Munday, [ca. 1825]<\/p>\n This slender volume arrived tucked inside a tatty envelope, in amongst many more substantial volumes, in a large donation.<\/p>\n Despite the lack of the cover and preliminary pages, it was the greatest treasure unpacked that day. The delicately hand-coloured illustrations are a delight.<\/p>\n The sentry and the shell fairy by George W Martin<\/i>.[Wellington, N.Z.?] : Shell Company of New Zealand, [192-]<\/p>\n The pictures are by Ida Rentoul Outhwaite (1888 \u2013 1960), a leading Australian children’s illustrator. This slender book was created as an advertisement and perhaps it is because it was “a freebie” that so few copies seem to have survived.<\/p>\n A soldier on guard near the pyramids in Egypt is deep in thought when he suddenly comes alert \u201cFor, though he was thinking about the Pyramid, yet, true to discipline, he never forgot that thousands of Australian and New Zealand soldiers were sleeping soundly close at hand, trusting in his alertness\u201d. His peace had been disturbed by a Shell Fairy who explains how the fairies had carried a wondrous fine oil in shells to oil the building equipment for the Pyramids. And the booklet closes with this advertisement:<\/p>\n The Boy\u2019s<\/i> and Girl\u2019s Own Annuals<\/i>, Chums<\/i>, etc, are a treasure trove of stories, both fictional and informational, and craft activities. I’ve always been intrigued by a less showy feature, the Correspondence pages. These only contain the answers, not the questions. Topics display a wide range of interests and concerns. Sometimes it is easy to guess what was asked, but others are slightly more mysterious. Here are some of the answers:<\/p>\n At the end-of-year event for members, we launched Notes-Books-Authors 11, authored by Beatrice Turner: Keeping \u201ceach of the twos in its right place\u201d: the problematic return journey in \u201cThe Cuckoo Clock\u201d<\/i> and \u201cThe Tapestry Room\u201d by Mrs Molesworth<\/i>. Bea Turner, 2008 FDNW Scholarship winner, then discussed her research and answered questions from the highly interested and entertained audience.<\/p>\n It is with great sadness we note the passing of two members of the Friends, and three notable children\u2019s authors.<\/p>\n Hugh Price: Energetic bookworm took words to millions<\/b><\/i> by Peter Kitchin in The Dominion Post <\/i>18 January 2010<\/p>\n Hugh Price was an eminent New Zealand publisher whose devotion to books was lifelong.<\/p>\n The influence and success of the Price Milburn company he founded in 1957 with school teacher Jim Milburn grew from kitchen-table beginnings into an important and influential publisher specialising in learn-to-read and educational books, with a general list of New Zealand non-fiction books, poetry and plays.<\/p>\n Price’s \u00a325 stake in the tiny Wellington company was half its start-up capital. By the time the sale of the company was concluded in 1982, it was New Zealand’s principal publisher of educational books, with substantial sales abroad.<\/p>\n Books were second nature to Hugh Price.<\/p>\n Price Milburn’s learn-to-read and storybook list ran to more than 400 titles, all edited or written by Price’s wife, Beverley Randell, and sales ran into the millions. He could have retired, but did not. Books were second nature to him. He collected, read, edited and designed them, and wrote or co-wrote bout 20 titles after 1982. His output was staggering, to say the least.<\/p>\n Like most New Zealanders, Price came to books as a child, although in his case he was a captive audience of one, the sole child of a Masterton woodwork teacher and his homemaker wife. He attributed his early start in reading to an affliction \u2013 he had been born with club feet. While he recuperated from a series of operations to straighten them, his mother adopted a massage routine as part of his healing and used the daily sessions to read to him. The patient was hooked for life. He was a schoolboy at Hadlow School in Masterton. His fascination with books would have doubtless seemed precocious in a classroom where the observations he offered were wider than the conformist prescriptions expected. The school’s reaction was violent disapproval.<\/p>\n Later, his physical inability to engage in field games and the corporal punishment used in futile attempts to make him meet Wairarapa College’s physical standards drew a lifelong distaste for sport. Significantly, the lesson he learned was that he would never inflict violence on anyone. Cruelty and bullying were anathema to him, and his courage in the face of adversity was unshakeable for the rest of his life.<\/p>\n Wellington would prove to be a saviour in 1948 for this small, quiet bloke with a stutter, fresh from the Wairarapa as a new student at Victoria University College and later at the city’s teachers’ college. At the time, the Victoria was a crucible for debate \u2013 academic, political and often very public. Price thrived in it. He would lose his stutter on the way to earning a master’s degree in history and, crucially, gain entry to the world of book production, thanks to Prof John Beaglehole, who explained to him how he was going about production of his book on the papers of Captain Cook.<\/p>\n His teaching career was short-lived. He took a job in the textbook department at Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd (now Whitcoulls) in Lambton Quay, and transferred to their London buying office in 1955.<\/p>\n He studied print production and typography at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and at the London School of Printing and Graphic Arts, and worked on small projects for Penguin, Methuen, Hodders, Gollancz and the BBC.<\/p>\n He returned to Wellington in 1957 to be manager of Modern Books, a co-op retailer at 48a Manners St with 3000 members. Modern Books was an important source of books for New Zealanders. It was Price’s pledge that the shop would locate, order and import any book from any publisher anywhere for any New Zealander. It not only catered for readers in English, but imported books for migrants keen to read in their own language.<\/p>\n The shop attracted the interest of the police Special Branch. There was an assumption that it was a Communist Party front, notably because it sold books in foreign languages from Iron Curtain countries along with books from obscure publishers in the West.<\/p>\n For Price, it was grist to the mill. He was not to know it, but at the time he and two student colleagues, none of whom were communists, were already on the Special Branch list as compilers of a short-lived cyclostyled sheet Newsquote, which consisted of commentaries they had clipped from foreign newspapers but which had not seen the light of day in the local press.<\/p>\n Penned by reputable journalists or commentators from illustrious newspapers, among them the Wall Street Journal, The Times and The New York Times, they were somehow viewed as potentially deleterious to the conduct of good order in Cold War New Zealand. Price sought to have more than 50 years of official covert attention ended for what he described as an official fantasy. The matter was resolved last year when he received a letter from the SIS, successor to the Special Branch, telling him that “hindsight shows Newsquote to have been misjudged”, but there was no apology.<\/p>\n Later, he would move to the School Publications branch of the Education Department until 1963, when he was made the founding general manager of the Sydney University Press.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Price Milburn, the publishing company he had co-founded in 1957, was able to cover its costs but was not yet able to employ any of its partners on a sustainable basis. While the Prices handled the editing and production side of the company, the Milburns handled sales and distribution from the garage at their Silverstream residence.<\/p>\n Change was in the wind. In 1964, Milburn advised Price that they had just had an order from the United States. The order was for 1.4 million learn-to-read books. Business boomed and in 1968, Price, his wife and daughter returned to Wellington, where he became managing director of the company and moved the operation to central Wellington. By the 1970s, Price Milburn was a substantial operation in New Zealand publishing, and grew to include a music division managed by conductor Peter Zwartz.<\/p>\n The educational books were the company’s lifeblood, largely because the Price Milburn school readers revolutionised the way children learned to read. Graded words, careful layouts and stories with plots are still the essence of Price Milburn readers, which are now produced by the Cengage company of Australia from a list of 1000 titles. About 200 million have now been printed.<\/p>\n Hugh Price held that literacy itself was a civil liberty. If one cannot read or is discouraged from it or not permitted to read, or if books are withheld or sanitised, chances are that society will act out an endless set of undemocratic drills.<\/p>\n He was a longtime member of the successful campaign to end capital punishment, and of the Council for Civil Liberties. He loathed racism wherever it reared its head. From the 1960s, he campaigned for mixed-race All Black teams to tour South Africa when the New Zealand Rugby Football Union still picked all-white teams to conform with South Africa’s apartheid obligations.<\/p>\n He was a member of Defence and Aid, an organisation that raised funds for apartheid’s victims hauled before South Africa’s courts, and he was a trustee of the Africa Information Centre in Wellington.<\/p>\n Hugh Price was kindly. He had an impish sense of humour. He was always generous with his time and, once he could afford it, generous with his money. He was an important figure in the establishment of the Victoria University Press and in 1992, with his wife and daughter, Susan, he established the Gondwanaland Press. The Prices gave the Randell Cottage as a writer’s residence.<\/p>\n In what passed for retirement, he wrote or co-wrote bout 20 titles, among them a dinosaur series for children and historical books. He made considerable donations to New Zealand libraries. In 2001, he gave more than 300 examples of school textbooks published in New Zealand between 1860 and 1960 to the Alexander Turnbull Library and another collection to the Auckland University library.<\/p>\n He served on the Book Council and was a consultant to the Alexander Turnbull Library.<\/p>\n Price did not stand on ceremony, although he submitted to it when he was made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in last year’s New Year’s honours list. He was further honoured last August when Victoria University awarded him an honorary doctorate of literature for services to publishing and for his contribution to New Zealand literature.<\/p>\n Hugh Price is survived by his wife, Beverley, and their daughter, Susan Price.<\/p>\n Hugh Charles Llewellyn Price, book publisher: born Wellington, July 13, 1929; married 1959 Beverley Randell 1 daughter; died Newtown, December 28, 2009, aged 80.<\/p>\n Sources: J Milburn, S Price, B Randell, R Steele, V O’Sullivan, A Somerset, NZ Book Council and others.<\/p>\n Lady White died in Melbourne on 20 January 2010. She was 93 years old. Lady White had returned to her home town of Melbourne following the death of Sir John in November 2007. Lady White was a member of the Friends of the Dorothy Neal White Collection for many years and regularly attended events in Wellington. Lady White also wrote Notes-Books-Authors Number 3 December 1989 about her ancestor the children\u2019s author Mrs George Cupples<\/p>\n John Ryan<\/b><\/p>\n Artist and animator best known for the children’s cartoon characters Captain Pugwash and Mary, Mungo and Midge<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n By Peter Stanford, guardian.co.uk, Friday 24 July 2009<\/p>\n In the age of computer-generated animation and wisecracking cartoon characters, the work of the illustrator John Ryan, who has died aged 88, looks a little old-fashioned. But there was a childish innocence about his blustering pirate Captain Pugwash shouting “dollopping doubloons” or “kipper me capstans” that marked him indelibly as part of BBC children’s television in its 1970s heyday. Ryan’s techniques \u2013 using cardboard cut-outs of the characters, manipulated by levers against a painted background \u2013 seemed more like Punch and Judy to children used to Toy Story.<\/p>\n Advances in technology may have left Ryan behind but Pugwash’s classic status was confirmed in the late 1990s by the children’s TV conglomerate Britt Allcroft (later Gullane Entertainment), whose computer-animated episodes (made by John Cary Films with Ryan’s approval) brought in a fresh audience.<\/p>\n In its time, though, Ryan’s work was at the forefront of his craft. Mary, Mungo and Midge, made for the BBC in 1969, took as its subject a latch-key child who lived in a tower block with her dog and mouse. Narrated by the newsreader Richard Baker and Ryan’s daughter Isabel, the series even managed to capture the spirit of the age with its assumption that high-rise living was exciting and the way of the future. Later, The Adventures of Sir Prancelot (1972), also for the BBC, featured a medieval crusader knight with an almost scientific taste for inventing new gadgets, to the evident displeasure of his spouse, Lady Hysteria.<\/p>\n In 1981, Ryan worked with Anne Wood, later the creator of Teletubbies, on The Ark Stories, an acclaimed animated series for Yorkshire TV in which each episode started in his studio in Notting Hill, west London. A mixture of dapper in his cravat and free-spirited with his unruly grey hair, he introduced each tale of Jaffet and Jannet, children of the Ark, by doing some sketches on his desk.<\/p>\n It was to religious themes that Ryan increasingly turned in later years. A devout and traditional Catholic who liked his mass in Latin, he had since the early 1960s contributed a weekly cartoon for the Catholic Herald featuring his own Vatican insider, the scheming but inept Cardinal Grotti. He managed always to avoid upsetting the church, gently poking fun at the ecclesiastical bigwigs but never ridiculing them.<\/p>\n In the 1990s he produced a string of Bible-based storybooks for young children, including Mabel and The Tower of Babel (1990), The Very Hungry Lions (1996) and Jonah, A Whale of a Tale (1992). He always had a certain schoolboy sense of fun that is well reflected in his choice of book titles. When combined with increasingly lavish illustrations, the result was something to be treasured.<\/p>\n Ryan never took his art too seriously. In some of his public lectures and many visits to schools, he would cheerfully demonstrate how Grotti, Pugwash and Prancelot were all closely related by drawing the outline of one and then redressing the chubby, almost triangular figure in the garb of the other two.<\/p>\n He was born in Edinburgh, the son of a diplomat, Sir Andrew Ryan. His childhood hero, he later recalled, was AA Milne. He wrote his first story at the age of seven, entitled The Adventure of Tommy Brown. He went to school at the Catholic Ampleforth college, in North Yorkshire.<\/p>\n School was followed almost immediately by wartime service, first in India and then Burma. On discharge, he studied art at the then Regent Street Polytechnic and then taught at Harrow.<\/p>\n All the time, however, he was working on cartoon characters. Captain Horatio Pugwash, forever bold before the event, suffered 12 rejections before he cast off in 1950 in his ship, the Black Pig, in the first ever edition of the Eagle comic, and then enjoyed an eight-year passage in the Radio Times. He first appeared on television in a series of 58 black-and-white episodes (1957-66), but fared better in books until his mid-1970s small-screen heyday.<\/p>\n For the Eagle, Ryan also introduced Harris Tweed, Extra Special Agent, a topical figure given the communist spy scandals of the 1950s. In Girl magazine, he created Lettice Leefe, the greenest girl in school who had a certain sanitised St Trinian-style charm, while in Swift, Sir Boldasbrass first took up his sword. By 1954, Ryan was sufficiently in demand to risk giving up his day job. He married a fellow artist, Priscilla Blomfield, in 1950, and they went on to have three children.<\/p>\n It was Mary, Mungo and Midge that truly made Ryan’s name on television. The series was aimed at a younger audience than Pugwash and featured Isabel’s voice as Mary. Ryan’s “real-time” technique for animating his artwork involved special set-ups or backdrops he called captions, and then levers and pull-aways to make the movements. It was often Ryan himself or Priscilla who were operating the levers to move hands, arms and mouths. A standard episode would take them three weeks to film, usually in the studio above their home, with the help of contributors such as Percy Edwards \u2013 who did the animals on Noah’s Ark \u2013 and Peter Hawkins, who had provided the voices for the Flowerpot Men.<\/p>\n Despite its enduring reputation, there were only 13 episodes of Mary, Mungo and Midge. Sir Prancelot, which followed, clocked up 32 before Ryan turned back to Pugwash. He made a further series of 30 five-minute, colour cartoons, again using Hawkins to voice the pirate and his crew \u2013 Tom the cabin boy, Willy and Barnabas and Master Mate \u2013 as well as Cut-Throat Jake, Pugwash’s arch enemy.<\/p>\n Even when the series’ 1970s slot, just before the early evening news, was only a distant memory, new Pugwash comic strip books by Ryan \u2013 such as The Secret of the San Fiasco and The Quest of the Golden Handshake in the late 1980s \u2013 continued to command a healthy following.<\/p>\n At around this time, the good captain became the subject of an urban myth. The crew included characters, it was commonly believed, called Master Bates, Roger the Cabin Boy and Seaman Staines \u2013 all loaded with sexual innuendo. Ryan responded angrily to published misrepresentations and his lawyers successfully obtained public retractions from the Guardian and the now defunct Sunday Correspondent.<\/p>\n With their children grown up, the Ryans gave up their London base in 1987 and moved to Rye on the East Sussex coast, where they settled easily into a gentler pace of life. An aortic aneurism in the late 1990s slowed him up a little.<\/p>\n Tall, sometimes eccentric in dress and with red cheeks \u2013 the result of many long walks in all sorts of weather with his beloved dogs \u2013 Ryan never sought the limelight. If he had to meet his public, he preferred them to be children, among whom he was most at ease. In private, though, he was always the wittiest of company. In general, his views were conservative; and occasionally his cartoons could carry a sharp political edge. At the time of the first Gulf war, he produced for the Catholic Herald a drawing of the Cenotaph, doubling as a petrol pump.<\/p>\n He is survived by Priscilla and their children, Marianne, Christopher and Isabel.<\/p>\n \u2022 John Ryan, artist, illustrator and animator, born 4 March 1921; died 22 July 2009<\/p>\n \u2022 This article was amended on 30 July 2009. The original said that Sir Prancelot appeared in Swift magazine; two references differed over whose voice was used for the character Mary; and John Ryan was said to have had a stroke. This has been corrected.<\/p>\n Sid Fleischman, Newbery Medal-winning children’s writer, dies at 90<\/i><\/p>\n By Dennis McLellan, LA Times<\/i> March 21, 2010<\/p>\n Fleischman, known for his humor and nose for history, wrote more than 50 children’s books, including ‘The Whipping Boy’ and ‘By the Great Horn Spoon!,’ as well as biographies for young readers.<\/p>\n Sid Fleischman was a successful suspense novelist and screenwriter whose credits included the screenplay for his novel “Blood Alley” when he decided to write a book that his young children could read so they would understand just what it was he did at home all day.<\/p>\n “I seem to have written a children’s book,” Fleischman wrote to his agent in New York. “If you’re not interested, just drop it in the waste basket.” The 1962 lighthearted tale of an Old West traveling magician and his family, “Mr. Mysterious & Company,” sold to the first publishing house that read it, launching Fleischman into a long and much-honored career as a children’s book author.<\/p>\n Fleischman, whose book “The Whipping Boy” earned him the prestigious Newbery Medal in 1987, died of cancer Wednesday at his home in Santa Monica, the day after his 90th birthday, said his son, Paul.<\/p>\n “Sid was a national treasure in the field of children’s books,” said Lin Oliver, a children’s book author and executive director of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. “It really is a monumental loss for the field.”<\/p>\n Known for his humor, love of language, adventuresome plotting and nose for history, Fleischman wrote more than 50 children’s books. “He was a true master of the craft and a writer’s writer,” said Oliver, adding that Fleischman wrote in many genres, including novels, tall tales, picture books and biographies.<\/p>\n “By the Great Horn Spoon!,” a lively tale of the California Gold Rush, has been required fourth-grade reading in California and was turned into the 1967 movie “The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin.”<\/p>\n Fleischman had written more than 30 children’s books when he won the Newbery Medal for “The Whipping Boy.”<\/p>\n He was inspired to write the book after discovering the practice of the royal houses of Europe, where, he told The Times in 1987, “the prince, the heir to<\/p>\n the throne, couldn’t be punished. So if they had a rotten prince, they installed a commoner off the streets, and he took the punishment for the prince. “The injustice of it enraged me. The lunacy of it!”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Fleischman came to enjoy writing for children. In another 1987 Times interview, he recalled the fan letters he began receiving after his first children’s book was published. “Adult readers never write,” he said. “It was the first time I ever felt in touch with my audience.” And, he said, “their letters are wonderful. They make you feel like Shakespeare must have felt when he heard the applause.” For the first time, he recalled, “I felt I was doing something important.”<\/p>\n One of the pleasures of writing for children, he said, is the enduring nature of good children’s books. “Adult novels are as ephemeral as newspapers,” he said. “Children’s books stay in print for decades.”<\/p>\n The list of Fleischman’s books include two biographies for young readers in recent years, “Escape!: The Story of the Great Houdini” and “The Trouble Begins at 8: A Life of Mark Twain in the Wild, Wild West.” “Sir Charlie,” a biography of Charlie Chaplin, will be published in June.<\/p>\n Fleischman was a founding member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and had been on its board of advisors since its inception in 1972. In 2003, the organization named an award for him that honors humorous writing for children. “Humor is the oxygen of children’s literature,” he told the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch in 1997. “There’s a lot of competition for children’s time, but even kids who hate to read want to read a funny book.”<\/p>\n Born March 16, 1920, in Brooklyn, Fleischman grew up in San Diego, where he began studying magic as a child. As a teenager, he performed in vaudeville and nightclubs. His first book, a collection of magic tricks he had created, was published when he was 19.<\/p>\n After serving in the Navy Reserve aboard a destroyer escort during World War II, he graduated from what is now San Diego State University in 1949. He worked as a reporter on the San Diego Daily Journal and was associate editor of a small magazine before he began writing fiction full time in 1951.<\/p>\n Fleischman’s “The Charlatan’s Handbook,” a 1993 compendium of magic tricks, was written for professional magicians. “He was somebody, more than anyone I know, who loved his work; he loved to write,” said Oliver. “He also was a great magician. He was devoted to that, and I think he regarded writing as magic.” Indeed, Fleischman’s 1996 autobiography for young readers is titled “The Abracadabra Kid: A Writer’s Life.”<\/p>\n His wife, Betty, died in 1993. In addition to his son, who also is a Newbery Medal-winning writer, Fleischman is survived by his daughters, Jane Fleischman and Anne Fleischman Miller; his sister, Arleen Kornet; and four grandchildren.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nRESEARCH LIBRARIAN<\/h3>\n
About the Research Librarian position<\/h3>\n
![\"Photograph](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/ms-235x300.jpg\" "\\"Mary")
<\/a>From the former Research Librarian\u2019s farewell speech<\/h3>\n
![\"Cover](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/newapril10_html_m1459d5c2-193x300.jpg\" "\\"Cover")
<\/a>![\"Lynne](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/newapril10_html_m1e043e5e-225x300.jpg\" "\\"Lynne")
<\/a>![\"newapril10_html_1cbd1097\"](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/newapril10_html_1cbd1097-221x300.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/h2>\n
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EVENTS<\/h2>\n
April 2009<\/h3>\n
![\"Image](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/nose.jpg\" "\\"Lessons")
<\/a>![\"A](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/notes-192x300.jpg\" "\\"A")
<\/a>![\"shell](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/shell-229x300.jpg\" "\\"Shell")
<\/a>Boy\u2019s Own Annual<\/h5>\n
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November 2009<\/h3>\n
Obituaries<\/h3>\n
![\"Photograph](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/newapril10_html_7624e7c5.png\" "\\"Hugh")
<\/a>Lady Elspeth White, Friend and donor<\/h3>\n
![\"Photo](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/newapril10_html_m55c87ddc-300x180.jpg\" "\\"John")
<\/a>![\"Captain](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/newapril10_html_m2d16b25-300x225.jpg\" "\\"Captain")
<\/a>![\"Sid](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/newapril10_html_2719a00e.jpg\" "\\"Sid")
<\/a>Photo: Kevin O\u2019Malley, Publishers Weekly<\/h3>\n
![\"Cover](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/newapril10_html_b75c410-189x300.png\" "\\"Cover")
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![\"William](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/willmayne-300x180.jpg\" "\\"William")
<\/a>![\"Image](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/mouse1.jpg\" "\\"The")
<\/a>![\"Cover](\"http:\/\/dnwfriends.nzl.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/canoe-203x300.jpg\" "\\"Cover")
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