Whether it’s for yourself, your children or your grandchildren, the original 1960s Ivor The Engine book is a lovely thing to own.
It was written by Oliver Postgate and contains Peter Firmin’s original artwork. It was first released in 1962, and this reissue is a ‘faithful reproduction’ of the first-ever Ivor the Engine book.
The book wasn’t a standalone volume; it was originally published in 1962 to coincide with the show’s original broadcast on ITV. It doesn’t seem that old, perhaps because the show was revived in the 1970s, with new episodes created by the BBC. But it was a much older show.
Available in hardback and paperback, the book is likely to have lost none of its appeal for train-loving pre-schoolers. The plot goes something like this:
Something was the matter with Ivor. It wasn’t that he hadn’t enough coal in his fire, he had plenty. It wasn’t that he hadn’t enough water in his boiler, his boiler was full. It was just that ― as Jones the Steam (his driver) put it ― he just wasn’t pulling right.
So Jones the Steam and Dai Station took Ivor to see the Chief Engineer. They took him all the way down the Main Lines as far as Pontypool Roads, where the big engines are. The Chief Engineer and his assistants gave Ivor a thorough examination. They looked in his boiler, blew on his tubes, dismantled his pistons, and tapped his little wheels with a hammer, but they couldn’t find anything wrong with him, not anything mechanical, that is. No, it was something deeper than that, something that couldn’t be mended by an engineer.
Jones the Steam, with the help of nearly everybody else in that part of Wales, set out to find the trouble and put it right. They found it all right, and soon Ivor was the proudest and happiest little engine in the whole country.
Produced by independent Welsh publishing house Candy Jar Books, the 48-page book is available to buy now, selling for £18.40 (hardback) and £12.99 (paperback) at the Amazon website.