Illustrator and Humorist
Adamson was commissioned by Faber & Faber and later by Puffin Books to illustrate several of Ted Hughes’s books for children in their various editions. The collaboration began with a typescript for Meet My Folks! sent to Adamson in April 1960. The presence of a Massachusetts address on the manuscript inspired him to give his illustrations to Hughes’s poems a New England flavour.
‘Did I tell you we’ve seen the black-and-white line drawings for his [Ted’s] children’s book?
Very fine and witty, for college people as well as children, I feel ... a real gift book.’
Sylvia Plath in a letter to her mother and her brother, Warren, June 11, 1960 (Letters Home, Sylvia Plath, edited by Aurelia Schober Plath, Faber and Faber, London, and Harper & Row, 1975)
‘When Charles Monteith at Faber had lunch with Ted and Thom Gunn last week, he said, ‘‘Tom Eliot is delighted with the drawings and poems in Meet My Folks! ’’ ’
Sylvia Plath in a letter to her mother, September 28, 1960 (ibid.)
‘We were pleased beyond our dreams at your illustrations of Meet My Folks—they were absolutely right.’
Ted Hughes in an undated letter to George Adamson, probably early June 1962
Published 7 April 1961, the first printing was of 5,000 copies. There have been several reprints: the second printing of 3,145 copies (1967); the third of 4,000 copies; the fourth of 5,000 (1974).1
The first American edition of 4,000 copies was published 13 June 1973 with illustrations by Mila Lazarevich (The Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc., Indianapolis and New York).2
The first paperback edition was published as a Puffin Book in August 1977 with a specially drawn cover and four new drawings—‘My Fairy Godmother’, ‘My Other Granny’, ‘My Uncle Mick’ and ‘My Own True Family’—to illustrate four new poems. The first printing was 32,000 copies with a reprint in 1980 of 12,000 copies.3
Gordon Crosse set the poems to music and the score with a selection of Adamson’s drawings was published by Oxford University Press in 1965.
Notes
1 Keith Sagar and Stephen Tabor: Ted Hughes: A Bibliography 1946–1980, Mansell Publishing Limited,, London, 1983, p. 10.
2 Ibid., p. 11.
3 Ibid., p. 12.