Featured in The Saturday Book #11 there is a drawn graphic diary by Edward Ardizzone. A Holiday Afloat is listed as having ‘a slight misspelling or two’. It includes 20 pen drawings, most of which depict the artist and his family.
Some of the Ardizzone sketchbooks later developed into illustrated diaries, but on certain occasions Ardizzone would start with a diary in mind from the beginning. As an illustrator, the conjunction of text and drawing attracted him and he enjoyed the making of a written and pictorial record. After the war he made a number of small diaries.
The first was of A Holiday Afloat when he took a boat with his wife and his youngest child, Nicholas, in September 1949, and journeyed from Lechlade to Oxford. There were miseries and mishaps but some good moments, and the weather was awful, cold and wet.
The drawings are some of his happiest in this vein and at the end the reader is left wishing for more. A Holiday Afloat was later published with some spelling mistakes in The Saturday Book, edited by Leonard Russell (1951). †
† Edward Ardizzone: Artist and Illustrator by Gabriel White p99, 1979.
