Roger Hargreaves (1935-1988) is Britain’s third best-selling author of all time, having sold in excess of 100 million books. He is the man responsible for entertaining generations of children with his Mr Men and Little Misses books.
You can find Roger Hargreaves’ author page on Amazon here. In addition, we have some original vintage books for sale in our shop.
The first 43 of 84 Misters and Misses books were drawn by Roger and the subsequent ones were created by his son, Adam.
Adam (b. 1963) explains:
It was a good 10 years after his death before I wrote one of my own Mr Men books because I always saw it as his thing… (I’m) principally trying to follow what my father did as closely as possible… My dad’s style of drawing changed enormously and I started drawing the characters in the way that he was doing it at the time of his death. But now my own hand has taken charge.
It was actually Adam who was the initial inspiration for Roger’s first ever Mr Men book, ‘Mr Tickle’. In 1971, when he was eight-years old, Adam asked his father what a tickle looked like. Roger spontaneously drew the first version of what would become the renowned cartoon character; a small, round orange man with extraordinarily long arms that could reach out anywhere to tickle people. He soon followed this up with Mr Greedy, Mr Happy, Mr Nosey, Mr Sneeze and Mr Bump.
The books have been reproduced in many other languages, and their titles often make me smile; Mr Bump is Herr Dumpidump in German and Mr Greedy is M. Glouton in French.
If you fancy a trip down memory lane, I found a play-list on YouTube that includes all the episodes in the Mr Men television series.