More than a thousand books from Raymond Briggs’s personal library have gone on sale at Oxfam’s Hove bookshop and online.
Donated by Briggs’s estate following his death in August 2022, the collection spans illustration, cartoons, comics and social history – with works by Aubrey Beardsley, EH Shepard, Charles Schulz, Edward Gorey and Posy Simmonds included.
Briggs, an author and illustrator, was best known for his 1978 short story The Snowman, along with other works such as Fungus the Bogeyman, When the Wind Blows and Ethel and Ernest.
His collection also includes a signed first edition of Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World, historic comic annuals and titles on nuclear disarmament that echo When the Wind Blows.
One book, Britain’s Wartime Milkmen, nods to Briggs’s father Ernest, whose life inspired Ethel and Ernest.
Briggs lived beneath the South Downs for more than 50 years and taught illustration at Brighton School of Art – now Brighton University – from the early 1960s to 1986.
The landscape behind the flight scene in The Snowman was inspired by the Downs near his home, and the Royal Pavilion, close to his old art school studio, in Brighton, features in the story.
Martin Hill, a volunteer at Oxfam’s Hove bookshop who has been working on the collection, said: “What’s fascinating is the range.
“You begin to see connections between the books Raymond Briggs created and the books and artists he chose to have around him.
“There are great illustrators and cartoonists but then you find books about ageing, bathrooms, domestic life, old annuals and wartime milkmen.
“It is serious, funny, ordinary and sometimes rather dark – which feels very familiar to anyone who knows Raymond Briggs’s work.
“This collection offers a wonderful glimpse of the visual and intellectual world of one of Britain’s most distinctive illustrators – and we’re delighted that the books are going back into readers’ hands and raising money for Oxfam.”
Briggs was married to Jean Taprell Clarke until her death from leukaemia in 1973.
His long-term partner, Liz Benjamin, died in 2015, having had Parkinson’s disease.
He lived out his final years in Westmeston, near Ditchling, and died at the age of 88.
Sad he didn’t leave them to a children’s museum or the British Library where the collection could have been kept together.