Category Archives: Illustration

Calling all ex Puffineers!

I am looking for your stories and, if you have them, pictures about your time as members of the Puffin Club from it’s launch in 1967 through to its end in the early 1980’s.

I’m currently pulling everything together for a book to celebrate the Puffin Club in all its glory while us old birds can still remember it all. This is my thank you to the club as 2017 will see its fiftieth anniversary!

Puffin Post no.1 pages 11 and 12

Slightly ahead of schedule again! This is the first part of a really nice article that is particularly of interest to visual artists – it’s not often that you can get an insight into how an artist works (well alright, Quentin Blake was on BBC4 recently talking to Mark Lawson, but that was a rare insight! You can’t count SMart any more, thanks to the BBC decision not to screen anything featuring Mark Speight ever again – don’t get me started!!)

Anyway, back to business: This is the longest of the features in this first copy of Puffin Post. It certainly paved the way for future features. The only thing that is missing is the call for young readers to send in examples of their own work! I actually miss it!

Image from the collection of Ruth – Founder member 1487 – Restored S. Hassan Nov 2008

Bookplates

Another little treat for you. This is the original Puffin Club bookplate design. You would get a sheet of eight of these on pre-gummed paper. I think this has a lovely old school charm about it. It certainly felt like your books were safer when you lent them to friends (didn’t stop them from getting scuffed to hell though – you know who you are!!!!). 

The design was created by the illustrator Roland Ferns, who had worked with Kaye Webb during her time at Lilliput. Some of his work was surreal and heading into more adult imagery, but this one image is probably his most enduring.

The new Puffin Post club has revived this design with a lot of colour and the addition of their puffin mascot – as yet unnamed.