Hilaire Belloc’s bestselling Cautionary Tales was set as a one-day challenge for first-year students as part of the Publishing course ‘Create Lab’ module. These light-hearted verses warned misbehaving children of the terrible consequences that awaited them if they didn’t change their terrible ways. Belloc parodied the many Victorian advice books aimed at the upper classes and upwardly-mobile.
The humorous book, illustrated by Belloc’s friend Basil Blackwood, became a fixture of many 20th-century English childhoods – designed to be read aloud with both gusto and menace – and it has never been out of print.
Over 100 years later, sixty undergraduate students worked in pairs to reimagine these tales using new typefaces – using hand-drawn font software, adapted or drew new illustrations or created collage images. Some students created entirely new tales based on the behaviours of the early 21st-century such as over-use of mobile phones.
