The book collection of the creator of The Snowman and Fungus The Bogeyman has gone on sale at Oxfam’s Hove Bookshop in East Sussex. Online.
More than 1,000 books from the collection of beloved British author and cartoonist Raymond Briggs have been donated by his estate following his death in 2022 at the age of 88.
Briggs’ personal library spans comics, illustration, fiction, and social history, including works by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz and Winnie-the-Pooh illustrator EH Shepard, as well as a signed first edition of Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World, a 2005 book composed of excerpts from women’s magazines.
Other painters featured in the Briggs Library include Shirley Hughes, Aubrey Beardsley, Edward Gorey, and Posy Simmonds. According to Oxfam, there are approximately 30 comic annuals from the 50s, which “offer a glimpse of the visual world that shaped Briggs’ style”.
“What’s attractive is the range,” said Martin Hill, a volunteer at Oxfam Hove Bookshop. “You start to see the connections between the books Briggs created and the books and artists he chose.”
“There are great illustrators and cartoonists, but you still get books about ageing, bathrooms, domestic life, old annuals and wartime milkmaids,” he said. “It’s serious, funny, simple, and sometimes quite dark – which will feel very familiar to anyone who knows Briggs’ work.”
The collection includes pamphlets on nuclear disarmament, a topic explored in Briggs’s 1982 graphic novel When the Wind Blows. Monty Python’s Terry Jones and Michael Palin’s 1974 book, Bert Feig’s Nasty Book for Boys and Girls is also listed, as well as a set of John Constable’s reproduced drawings and a first edition copy of Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic novel Ridley Walker.
Born in Wimbledon in 1934, Briggs later spent more than 50 years living at the foot of the South Downs, near Hove. The area inspired the 1978 picture book The Snowman, which includes Brighton’s Royal Pavilion. Briggs taught illustration at the Brighton School of Art from the early 60s until 1986.
He is best known for picture books such as 1977’s Fungus the Bogeyman and 1973’s Father Christmas, which subverted the conventions of children’s storytelling by imagining a cantankerous Santa Claus.
“I love finding fantasy creatures and treating them realistically,” Briggs said in an interview with the Guardian in 2019, upon the publication of her illustrated memoir Time for Lights Out. “I don’t see any difference between writing children’s and adult books. My attitude is exactly the same. I make the book the way I want to.”
The animated adaptation of The Snowman first hit screens in 1982 and has been broadcast almost every Christmas since.
After Briggs’ death, children’s author Michael Rosen said that “We are lucky to have read and seen such a great work from a great artist with a great heart”.
Hill said the Oxfam collection “offers a wonderful glimpse into the visual and intellectual world of one of Britain’s most distinguished painters”. prices of books on online store Prices range from £5.99 to £400 for a first edition of Rawls Woman’s World.
