Orlando

Orlando the Marmalade Cat was created by the British artist and writer Kathleen Hale, who published the first book in 1938 and continued the series for more than three decades, producing nineteen volumes in all. Orlando lives with his wife Grace and their three kittens — Pansy, Blanche and Tinkle — and the books follow them through gently absurd adventures: buying a farm, going camping, becoming a judge, taking a trip abroad, keeping a dog.

What made the books remarkable was not the stories but the printing. Hale drew directly onto lithographic plates, a laborious and unusual technique for children's publishing, which gave the illustrations an intensity and richness of colour that ordinary process printing of the period could not approach. The Orlando books were physically large, extravagantly produced, and priced well below what their production cost should have allowed — they were, in publishing terms, a labour of love that only just survived the paper shortages of the war years.

The character had a real original. Hale had taken in a stray ginger tom in London, named him Orlando, and started telling stories about him to her two young sons at bedtime. When she began writing them down, she kept the real cat's temperament: unflappable, faintly pompous, and devoted to his family.

The series was enormously influential on the British picture book. Hale's use of colour, her willingness to fill a page edge to edge, and her habit of hiding jokes in the background for adults to find all fed into the work of later illustrators. The books went out of print for a period and were rediscovered and reissued by the Bodleian Library and others, and Orlando has since found a second audience among people who admire the artwork as much as the stories. Hale herself lived to be 101, and remained slightly bemused that a bedtime story about a stray cat had turned into a life's work.