Noel Carrington is particularly admired for his editorship of the Puffin Picture Books launched in 1940 by Allen Lane of Penguin Books. The non-fiction titles were inspired by the brightly coloured, mass-produced lithographed children's books being published at the time in the Soviet Union. The free exhibition "Noel Carrington: Nothing Need Be Ugly" at The Higgins Bedford (until September) brings together all 120 titles for the first time. 

Noel Carrington went back to Country Life Ltd in 1935 and was now in a position to commission and edit some of the best-known and beautifully illustrated children’s books of the twentieth century, which include the Orlando, the Marmalade Cat books (1938 onwards) by Kathleen Hale and the Captain Slaughterboard series by Mervyn Peake. (He was also responsible for commissioning the still-popular and delightful High Street (1938) by JM Richards and Eric Ravilious.)

Noel Carrington was educated at Bedford School and Oxford, wounded at the Somme, spent time in India setting up an office for Oxford University Press and learning his trade, and in the 1920s and 1930s worked for Country Life and Kynoch Press. All this is typical of his time and background, but he soon brought fresh ideas and vision to publishing, and started by commissioning Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden. This is one of the notebooks with engravings by Ravilious which were given to clients to demonstrate the quality of the Press' printing and binding. 

The subject on the Post this week is Noel Carrington (1885-1989) who has been described as an "unsung hero...a footnote man who appears fleetingly in indexes of biographies of the Bloomsbury Circle, design journals or publishing histories". If his name sounds familiar, it is because his sister was the artist Dora Carrington who drew this portrait (c1912). Despite his lack of renown, he is acknowledged to be one the twentieth century's most influential figures in the commissioning, editing, and designing of books . 

A Fine Day in February (Hellesdon, Norfolk) (undated, Norfolk Museums) is by John Middleton (1827-1856), "a landscape painter of great freshness and acute observation" and the youngest and the last important member of the Norwich School of painters, which was the first provincial art movement in Britain. The Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery has a fine collection of their work.  

Catkins, sticky buds, and pussy willow, the staples of primary school nature tables, are reliable early signs of spring. Catkins (1936, Aberdeen Art Gallery) is a wood engraving by Agnes Miller Parker (1895-1980) who excelled in the medium.