Six months ago, we alerted readers to a launch at Royal College Street’s Cob Gallery, which featured artist Miriam Elia’s subversive take on those much-loved 1960s Ladybird hardback learning books. Called We Go To The Gallery, its premise was simple but brilliant: Mummy takes Peter and Jane to a gallery to learn about “sex, death and contemporary art”.
Self-published by Elia with help from a successful Kickstarter campaign, each image was created with a mixture of watercolour, gouache and digital photographic manipulation, the text written by Miriam Elia and her brother Ezra. Some of the pages were dark, some shocking, most laugh-out-loud funny.
But it was all a bit too much for Ladybird themselves. “They were preparing to take me into mediation,” Miriam says, “a pre-court process that costs £1000 per hour. Their resolution was that I deliver all books to them for destruction, and that the book should never be reprinted again.”
Yet after repeated requests from Elia’s solicitor, Ladybird offered “no proof of ownership of copyright in the illustrations”, she says, and soon discovered that the copyright had been traded back and fourth between The Copyrights Group and Penguin. “Neither had any paperwork or evidence to offer me, so the area was legally vague. I was later told that the illustrated copyright may have been returned to the artists after 25 years of publication.”
The upshot was that Penguin could not destroy anything without a court order, so Elia decided to stop corresponding with them. “I then spent three months carefully removing all mention of Peter and Jane, and subtly re-illustrating the book with new characters Susan and John, before changing the brand markings to a Dung Beetle. I now believe the book is protected as an original piece of work, and have reprinted the new version without their permission.”
And the revised images – as you can see running through this story – are equally arresting.
But who is Elia, anyway? A “multi-disciplinary” artist and Sony Nominated comedy writer, Elia, who was brought up in Kentish Town (and went to Acland Burghley, school-fans), had her first graphic novel, The Diary of Edward The Hamster 1990-1990, published by Macmillan, which has sold over 15,000 copies in the UK. Not only that, her satirical work has also appeared all over: The Independent, Hunger Magazine, The Guardian and more.
