Happy Birthday Mr Tickle!

Mr Tickle, and all the other Mr Men celebrate their 40th birthday today. It's funny to think that I was a month and a half old when Roger Hargreaves looked proudly at the fruit of his labour and saw the ideas from his head, not only on paper, but on the shelves of bookshops.

Roger died in 1988, but his son, Adam, has continued the Mr and Miss series, writing and illustrating new personality adventures, which is appropriate, given he was the reason the books came about. Little Adam had asked what a tickle looked like and his dad drew the first Mr Man.

The series of  49 Mr Men and 36 Little Miss books has sold 120 million books worldwide since their first appearance, an average of one copy sold every 2.5 seconds. In the last decade Roger Hargreaves became one of the best-selling British authors alongside J.K. Rowling.