Fun by Jan Pieńkowski is one in a series of four nursery cloth books that also includes Animals, Friends and Play.

It has eight separate images, with clear outlines and bright colours appropriate for a very young child.

Scenes from different seasons, such as winter (below), show various ways for children to have fun, from making a snowman to watching ducks splash.

Jan Pieńkowski (1936-2022) was an Anglo-Polish artist whose family fled Warsaw during the Second World War. He settled in England in 1946 and later went to King’s College, Cambridge to study English and Classics.

In the spread below we see a spring scene where a little girl is enjoying a muddy walk and a young boy is playing on the swings. A safe adult presence is implied by the two hands shown at the bottom left of the righthand page.

Pieńkowski is probably best known for his Meg and Mog picturebooks, which were created together with Helen Nicoll. The series features Meg, an accident-prone witch, Mog her black-and-white striped cat and Owl, a white owl.

But this talented artist also illustrated for older children, often using silhouette images, as in Joan Aiken’s The Kingdom Under the Sea, for which he won his first Kate Greenaway Medal (now known as the Carnegie Medal for Illustration) in 1971. He won a second Kate Greenaway Medal in 1979 for his novelty pop-up book The Haunted House.

Later images in Fun show summery scenes of sailing boats, a family picnic and a glorious rainbow. Each picture offers an opportunity to talk to a toddler about different activities.

Alternatively a baby may simply enjoy the tactile feel of the book, which is soft and squishy, with attractive white-stitched edges.

In 2019 Pieńkowski won the BookTrust Lifetime Achievement Award. As well as in illustration, he worked in theatre design, greetings cards, book-jacket design, posters and advertising.

Piańkowski appeared on Radio 4’s Private Passions in December 2008, and on Desert Island Discs in October 2009.