ON TARGET

Russell Cook browses through 50 years of a publishing phenomenon

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Knight, Piccolo, Puffin, Armada, Corgi. All nouns in their own right, they are also the names given to various children’s book publishing imprints of the 1960s and 70s. See one of these logos today on the spine of a book and you are most likely to be in a secondhand bookshop or browsing the wares of a Sunday morning car-boot sale.

The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, Biggles, Jennings, and the Just William stories are all under the banner of those iconic publishing emblems. However, there is one imprint that is often forgotten and overlooked – step forward the Target Books brand. It was created in 1973 by Universal-Tandem Publishing with the intention of producing a wide and varied children’s selection of titles, both fiction and non-fiction, to be published in paperback.

To begin with, the back catalogue consisted of buying up titles that were long out of print and to republish and rebrand them in accessible and friendly editions to attract the attention of children who were looking for something a little different. The cachet was to appeal to the more inquisitive reader and titles such as Investigating UFOs and The Story of the Loch Ness Monster would be marketed to appeal to the hide-behind-the-sofa brigade who liked good unsolved and creepy mysteries that could be lurking just around the corner of a vivid imagination.

Target books got off to a slow start and, despite publishing titles by such literary royalty as Elisabeth Beresford and Spike Milligan, the range was missing the big seller, the title that could propel the burgeoning imprint to stand proudly alongside the likes of other family favourites.