I like it when museums do this, which is placing items from their stores on public display rather than keeping them hidden and inaccessible. The National Railway Museum do this particularly well with the Warehouse, now called the North Shed (but I prefer Warehouse so I’m going to persist in calling it that). The Museum of English Rural Life have clearly spent some money on their set-up, but it’s visitor friendly and it keeps everything safe, but still visible.

Some of the clothing, including smocks and the like.

Bits from coffins, which to be fair are probably a little harder to incorporate into the main displays.

There’s no end of material on these shelves, and there’s also an area at the back which can’t be accessed without a prior appointment, but this has even more items visible.

The problem with running a museum on English rural life is that quite a lot of the exhibits are really quite bulky.

Anyway, I liked this upstairs section to the museum, there’s an exploration element to the whole arrangement. The museum has a total of 25,000 items and only a limited amount of space to display them, but they’re used what they have really well. They’ve also carefully, and no doubt laboriously, listed everything in their collections and this is available at https://merl.reading.ac.uk/merl-collections/search-and-browse/databases/.

More on this museum in other posts, but I was told by a friendly member of staff at the entrance when she was giving me directions that there was a Ladybird display. As the museum is about English rural life I thought it would be something about ladybirds in terms of beetles (expecting something similar to what Stuart wrote in the LDWA’s Strider magazine about bumble bees), but I was surprised and delighted to see that it was all about Ladybird books.

The cover of Bunnikin’s Picnic Party, the first Ladybird Book which was produced in 1940.

The pages of a Ladybird Book before cutting.

The original artwork from one of the Ladybird books.

One of the challenges for adapting books for the Arabic market, not least the days of the week all needed amending.

The dog was seen as unclean and was replaced by a goat.

Head coverings were added for this book.

And a switch from a pig to a sheep in this illustration.

An internal memorandum from Ladybird Books, indicating that the Saudi Government didn’t like a girl being used in one of the images, it needed to be a boy. it was duly changed.

And there’s the change that the Saudi Government requested.

Some of the foreign language editions.

And some of the collection of books that the museum has, which is a fairly comprehensive set. I remember having some of these, indeed quite a lot of them, and they remain a design classic.

This is the only permanent display of Ladybird Books anywhere in the world and I think that they’ve done a nice job here in presenting some of the titles and giving a background to their history. They change the main feature every few months to keep the displays seem fresh and I’d pop in and see what they’ve done if in the area again. This collection could perhaps do with a little more space to allow the museum to do everything they want, but this was a nice surprise to end my visit with.