Ant and Bee: The Mystery of the Disappearance of the Books and the Invisibility of Angela Banner

The Ant and Bee books which we came across when our children were young became a staple of our reading to them and their early reading. However, when you try to discover them today--in the real world or the virtual world--they are gone, and the scant information that I had found about their author Angela Banner is even more scant. I have Internet wandered a number of times over the years, but this time I will capture my wonderment:

[If you come here not knowing who Ant and Bee are, check out this one bookseller's nice page with pictures and story summaries of a few of the 13 books in the full series.]

Instead of Google, I start today with Wikipedia. Guess what? Angela Banner does not exist as an article at all! Not a single keystroke of biography. All that exists is a listing of the 13 Ant & Bee books with a very short introduction. Obviously, both of these can be easily remedied by editing but my focus today is rather on this search. So, on to Google.

First, do we go for finding Angela Banner or her books? I opt for the author, and luckily get a hit on someone's efforts--"The unOfficial Ant and Bee Homepage". Nothing about Angela Banner, but I do learn that Ant and Bee books are to be re-released in the UK. The note is dated January 28, 2008, but following the link to Amazon.co.uk they are taking orders for two books coming out in 2013! [In, US, you can preorder: Ant & Bee and More & More Ant & Bee.] [Caution: Added August 1, 2013: Read this!] Otherwise, this page has links to short personal memories of the books and to pictures and brief paragraphs on Ant, Bee, and Kind Dog, the principal animal characters in the books.

Cool, but nothing about Angela Banner at all. For folks just providing comments, another Google link leads to Goodreads pages for each of the reviews, but otherwise the links are to other persons named Angela Banner or to used book sites. The next good link is to The Pointless Museum which has scanned all of Ant and Bee Go Shopping--the cheapest available copy on Amazon being $60, so go and get your free read (showing the original cover).

On the second page of Google hits, I finally find a used book site that lists a birth year--1923--for Angela Banner. So, she was born!

On page three, I find a UK illustrator's blog post. Lottie Stoddart, on a tear after not finding her books in her parent's attic, goes Internet wandering herself. So, Lottie tells me that Angela Banner is not her real name, but rather "Angela Mary Maddison" and also reports her discovery of a biography available as an e-document from Amazon (US only). But $9.95 for four pages seems not be worth it as much to me as it was to Lottie, so I will try to discover more myself. Lottie's best find, however, has nothing to do with Angela Banner, but with Ant & Bee's re-creation as a clutch purse held by Tilda Swinton.

...on and on through page 10...no more hits outside book sellers and Goodreads. Following, Lottie's lead, I return and search for "Angela Mary Maddison". I now find a corporate trace of her existence: She was alive and appointed as a director of "Ant and Bee Limited" on May 28, 1991, providing an address, but otherwise stating that company is dissolved. I also find that on behalf of the "Ant and Bee Partnership," she has four UK trademarks, including one of her signature Angela Banner:

[Also find that this trademark was filed in 2002 and was up for renewal in 2012.]

Then, I find from the London Gazette that on April 3, 1968, by Deed Poll date May 8, 1968, she dropped the surname "Parsons". So what is that, she was married and had taken the name "Angela Mary Parsons" for a while? The address matches that of the corporate trace above (24 Cranley Mews, London S.W.7). But reading this page some more, I find also that other Maddisons dropped the Parsons name also that same day: Danne Mary Diarmid Maddison ("an infant spinster, and a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies by birth, ") and John Lincke Maddison ("Medical Student, a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies by registration")--her children?

Off the grid, I search published sources and find the following short personal information in Gale Group's "Contemporary Authors Online":

Married name legally changed from Parsons to Maddison, 1968; born May 14, 1923, in Bombay, India; daughter of Sydney Howard (an engineer) and Iris Lydia (MacDiarmid) Phipps-Lincke; married Lionel Parsons (an army officer), March 24, 1941; children: John Lincke Maddison, Danne Mary Diarmid Maddison. Education:Attended Ancaster Gate and House (boarding school), Bexhill, Sussex, England, 1933-37. Politics: Liberal. Religion: Roman Catholic. Avocational Interests: Painting. 

The same source also has Maddison telling it: No child is too young to 'read' a few words from memory in return for praise and this leads to reading confidence (too often destroyed by educating adults). I believe that children make the best reading teachers so I make books for shared-reading between children of different ages." It also says that Maddison was a lawyer and--for those needing to do more hunting--that she wrote two spin-off books: "Kind Dog on Monday" and "Kind Dog Up and Down the Hill", both published in 1972. Never seen any other reference to them! [Doing some work, one copy of the former can be purchased for almost $300; both are available in some libraries. The nearest for the latter is Princeton University's Rare Book Room.]

For a separate day also is the mystery of the one other Ant and Bee item: the "Ant and Bee Big Buy Bag" which I hope to see one day! [EDIT: And now HAVE: check it out.]