That was a long, dark, cold, wet, plague-ridden, miserable winter. Is it perhaps the case that we humans should, like the Moomins, as well as many other less fictional mammals, take ourselves to bed towards the end of November and sleep the whole thing out? I usually relish the necessity for stoic endurance through the dark, but this year was a bit much. Did you get the cough? It was no fun at all. Compulsory curiosity as to the specific pathogen that might be causing a respiratory infection is over, and we have returned to more normal times where it is enough to agree that there is A Bug Going Around. Sympathy to anyone currently in its grip. Thank goodness the days are getting longer. Not unexpected, yet still a source of such relief and happiness every year. Let us turn our faces to the sun and embrace the signs that spring may soon be upon us.

Although the past three months feature in my mind largely as a struggle against the cold and the dark, in fact as I look around the studio thinking what news to impart it seems to have been a period of remarkable productivity. Driving British Industry Forward. The government is talking up artificial intelligence, green energy and biotech. But are they aware that they have a thriving Unicorn and Hedgehog illustration sector? Not to mention that fact that we have recently adopted a powerful technology – which is to say lined paper – in our best-selling notebooks which used to be available only in plain?

That’s right folks. Hardback Notebooks, which we would probably call our signature dish if they were food and we were a restaurant, are now available with lined pages. This is the result of popular demand. There are people who like their notebooks plain and others who like them lined, and never the twain shall meet. Dear lined notebook devotees, we have done this for you, because of the plaintive emails that you began to send as soon as we first produced the plain sort. Thank you for hanging in there for years while we got our act together, gently bugging us, and we are sorry that they cost a little more than the plain kind but that is because of the extra expense of printing the lines. The paper does not come that way out of the mill.

In case you are not aware, our Hardback Notebooks are based on the beautiful Insel-Bücherei books of the inter-war years. The size is that of a Ladybird book, with light board covers properly covered and bound. The books open really flat, and are small enough to carry around easily. Insel-Bücherei books, like ours, were covered in patterned paper with a rectangular label on the front cover, but they were real books on an extraordinary variety of topics. Their beauty means they are often irresistible when spotted in a junk shop, in spite of your lack of interest in the topic in question and inability to read German. I have tens of them, just for the purpose of rearranging frequently and admiring the covers. Our intention with our notebooks was to create something very similar – the design cannot be improved upon, in our opinion – but which can actually occupy a useful place in your life.

Our slim Exercise Books are also very popular, and perhaps this is because they too are based on an ancient, tried and tested format, namely the old school exercise book: enough pages to contain one project, not so many to be daunting to begin, slender enough to actually finish. We have rolled out the new technology (new technology always seems to be ‘rolled out’. Is this a hangover from the early days of railways? Invention of the wheel?) in the Exercise Books too: now available in lined paper as well as plain.

The winter was a good time for drawing, between coughing fits, and as previously alluded to, hedgehogs and unicorns were the main focus of our illustrative efforts. Hedgehogs perhaps because of the powerful aforementioned desire to hibernate, which is what they will have been very sensibly doing.

The Hedgehogs have ended up as quartet on a concertina card, snuffling around in autumn leaves. It’s double-sided and on the other side some of the leaves are blank for you to write on.

We also got busy with Unicorns, as well as furbishing up a few old designs we were fond of: Bareback Rider and The Birthday Zebra, seen below with his model.

Finally, we brought to completion a long-standing desire to tackle newts. One of us feels that newts are uniquely charming and comic animals. (They can regrow lost limbs! They look like tiny dragons!) The others are less sure of the universal appeal of newts, but prepared to humour their colleague. There was a bit of experimentation (dithering) over the message, brought on by a slightly incoherent feeling that there was an exquisitely funny pun out there somewhere if only one could hit upon it. Shades of Jack Aubrey in the Patrick O’Brian novels.

In the end we went with ‘Any Newts?’ in the sense of ‘How are you doing?’. I’m not sure it quite worked out, but we’ll see. ‘Happy Birthday’ is really the only cast-iron, sure-fire, will-sell card message. For a business our size, anything else is pretty niche. A person once approached us to see if we had a card appropriate to send to a friend in middle-age, interested in gardening, on the occasion of her starting a café. We really didn’t. This card is for the friend you haven’t heard from for a while who likes amphibians… BIG market. Please order now and prove me wrong.