Ladybird Books are instantly recognisable. As well as helping generations of children to learn to read, they represented a vision of how people perceived their lives as things were changing around them. Helen Day is the unofficial – but unchallenged – historian of the role the books played in our lives. She will be celebrating the art, the books and the values which they represented – as she describes it ‘a mixture of idealism and realism’. Wanstead’s Oxfam bookshop will be celebrating the books too by exhibiting as many Ladybird books as it has been able to collect – and this is your chance to buy a piece of all our history.