![]() ![]() As Bond said, “She thought very highly of Paddington, as I did of her. Her realism (she studied bears at the London Zoo to get the anatomy just right) and warmth proved the perfect match to the story. In a letter suggesting that Collins accept this amusing story, Wilson presciently wrote, “If Paddington proved a great success, he could be made into a leading character, and have more books written about his adventures.” Collins signed up Bond in early 1958 and commissioned the illustrator Peggy Fortnum to visualize Paddington and draw the now-iconic pictures for the first edition. In 1958, an editor at Collins named Barbara Ker Wilson received a manuscript submission about a talking bear, which she opened with “initial suspicion”-as the publisher had received many other proposals featuring humanized animals that “are invariably either whimsy-whamsy, written down, or filled with adult innuendoes.” However, Wilson found herself “completely won over by the author’s simplicity of style” and his “simple and direct approach.” The manuscript, from a television cameraman named Michael Bond, was about a bear named Paddington. ![]()
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