Noel Carrington had been publishing illustrated children’s books for a few years before he created the Puffin Picturebook series at Penguin. He had worked with a range of new illustrators and authors while running the publishing arm of Country Life. Being part of the art and design world of the time (the Bloomsbury painter Dora Carrington was his sister) there will have been multiple influences on his creative approach for the series design. But it was sight of a pile of Soviet picturebooks brought to him by the artist and writer Pearl Binder, combined with his knowledge of French children’s nature books (published by Pere Castor) that confirmed the aesthetic approach. Next, was the issue of needing to manage the production cost to meet the intended cover price of sixpence and still be in business. This, together with the restrictions of wartime, led to Carrington’s unusual decision to use the technique of colour autolithography for the series.
Katharine Reeve 