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Ladybird Books is a London-based publishing company, trading as a stand-alone imprint within the Penguin Group of companies. The Ladybird imprint publishes mass-market children's books. ==History== The company traces its origins to 1867, when Henry Wills opened a bookshop in Loughborough, Leicestershire. Within a decade he progressed to printing and publishing guidebooks and street directories. He was joined by William Hepworth in 1904, and the company traded as Wills & Hepworth By August 1914, Wills & Hepworth had published their first children's books, under the Ladybird imprint. From the start, the company was identified by a ladybird logo, at first with open wings, but eventually changed to the more familiar closed-wing ladybird in the late 1950s. The ladybird logo has since undergone several redesigns, the latest of which was launched in 2006. Wills & Hepworth began trading as Ladybird Books in 1971 as a direct result of the brand recognition that their imprint had achieved in Britain. In the 1960s and 1970s the company's Key Words Reading Scheme (launched in 1964) was heavily used by British primary schools, using a reduced vocabulary〔"McNally and Murray (1968) claimed that while the average adult had a speaking vocabulary of about 20,000 words, an extremely large proportion of the language which people produced, and read, was made up of just 250 words. They then argued that if pupils were systematically taught these 250 words, they would be able to read the vast majority of any text they came across. The Ladybird Keywords reading scheme was devised to focus upon these keywords..." McNally, J. and Murray, W. (1968) Key Words to Literacy and the Teaching of Reading: a Basic Word List for Developing Early Reading and Writing Skills. London, Schoolmaster Publishing, cited in Janan, D., & Wray, D. (2012). Guidance on the principles of language accessibility in National Curriculum assessments: research background.〕 to help children learn to read.〔Skelton, C. (1997). Revisiting gender issues in reading schemes. Education 3-13, 25(1), 37-43. Chicago〕 This series of 36 small-format hardback books presented stereotyped models of British family life – the innocence of Peter and Jane at play, Mum the housewife, and Dad the breadwinner.〔Whiting, D. S. (1981). Sex Role Stereotyping and Ladybird Books. In Forum for the Discussion of New Trends in Education (Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 84-85). Chicago〕 Many of the illustrations in this series were by Harry Wingfield and Martin Aitchison. In the 1960s, Ladybird produced the Learnabout series of non-fiction (informational) books, some of which were used by adults as well as children. An independent company for much of its life, Ladybird Books became part of the Pearson Group in 1972. However, falling demand in the late 1990s led Pearson to fully merge Ladybird into its Penguin Books subsidiary in 1998, joining other household names in British children's books such as Puffin Books, Dorling Kindersley, and Frederick Warne. The Ladybird offices and printing factory in (Loughborough ) closed the same year, and much of the company's archive of historic artwork was transferred to public collections. In November 2014, Ladybird signed up to the Let Books Be Books campaign and announced that it was "committed" to avoiding labelling books as 'for girls' or 'for boys' and would be removing such gender labelling in reprinted copies. The publisher added: "Out of literally hundreds of titles currently in print, we actually only have six titles with this kind of titling". Its parent company, Penguin Random House Children’s division will also be following suit. Imprints of Ladybird Books Ltd. included Balloon, Paperbird, Sunbird〔Sally Wecksler. International Literary Market Place: ILMP 1994. R R Bowker. 1994. pp 443, 493 & 508. (Google Books ).〕 and Disney.〔ILMP: International Literary Market Place: 1999. Bowker. 1999. p 594. (Google Books ).〕 In October 2015, it was announced that Ladybird books would be publishing its first series of books for adults. The eight books, which parody the style and artwork of the company’s books for children, include the titles ''The Hangover'', ''Mindfulness'', ''Dating'' and ''The Hipster'', and were written by television comedy writers Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris. They will be published on 18 November 2015. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ladybird Books」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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