Everyone’s favourite bedtime story is back!
Mr Ellwood’s crazy, courageous quest to recover his stolen roller skate has delighted adults and children for generations. John Vernon Lord’s comic masterpiece is available again, fifty years after its first publication.
The much-loved and celebrated children’s story, written and illustrated by John Vernon Lord, Emeritus Professor of Illustrating at Brighton University, has been out of print for many years. Bouley Bay Books is bringing out a special, golden anniversary edition, to celebrate the fiftieth year after its original publication by Jonathan Cape in 1973.
In Lewis Carroll’s nineteenth century children’s classic, it was a White Rabbit who tempted Alice to go down a rabbit hole, leading to fantastically entertaining adventures. In what many regard as the most delightful children’s story of the twentieth century, it’s a mischievous mouse who creeps into one of Mr Ellwood’s precious roller skates. With a crack of the bootlace reins, he’s off – through a hole in the door and out of the house. Mr Ellwood and his pet cockerel have no choice but to give chase – still dressed in his signature blue-and-white striped pyjamas and riding perilously on his one remaining roller skate. Their journey takes them to the bottom of a river, out to tumultuous seas, up perilous, snowy mountains, across a scorching desert, to a heartless city where they leap off a skyscraper with only an umbrella for a parachute, through a tangled overgrown forest, across a crocodile-infested moat to a medieval castle and then home at last – in time to start the story all over again.
This wildly inventive and delightful tale is the twentieth century equivalent of Alice in Wonderland. It deserves to be available to this and all future generations of children.
John Vernon Lord (born 1939 in Glossop, Derbyshire, England) is an author, illustrator and educator. He studied at Salford School of Art and at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. His best-known works include children’s book The Giant Jam Sandwich (1972) and his award-winning edition of The Nonsense Verse of Edward Lear (1984), both published by Jonathan Cape. His children’s books have been translated into many languages. He has twice been the overall winner of the Victoria and Albert Museum Illustration Awards, with his Aesop’s Fables in 1990 and for his illustrations in James Joyce’s Ulysses in 2018, when he was also awarded the Moira Gemmill Illustrator of the Year and Best Illustrated Book prize. Lord’s illustrated edition of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake was published by the Folio Society in 2014. Three monographs on his work have been published – Drawing Upon Drawing (2007) and Drawn to Drawing (2014) and Random Notes about Doodling, Sketching, Drawing and Illustrating (2023). Lord has illustrated the Folio Society’s Myths and Legends of the British Isles, Icelandic Sagas, and Epics of the Middle Ages. In addition, he has illustrated several classics of children’s literature, including Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (2009), Through the Looking Glass (2011), and The Hunting of the Snark (2006), published by Artists’ Choice Editions. Lord has lectured on the art of illustration in the UK and internationally for the past 60 years. He was Chair of the Graphic Design Board of the Council for Academic Awards during the 1980s, and he is Professor Emeritus at the University of Brighton, having been Professor of Illustration there from 1986 and where he taught from 1961 to 1999. An Honorary DLitt was conferred upon him by the University of Brighton in 2000. An Honorary Fellowship was conferred upon him by Kingston University in 2022. He is married with three daughters and 7 grandchildren.
