He was also a dreadful tease and used to enjoy winding me up Adam inherited Dad’s artistic talents I was incredibly jealous of his ability. What made it worse was that people automatically expected me to be similarly talented, but I couldn’t draw to save my life We are totally different I’m a lot louder than Adam and probably more obnoxious. I expect I irritate him constantly in the office but he’s very easy-going.It makes me laugh that there’s this impression of my dad behind a desk wearing some old cardie, doing his little books for kids He was 6ft 5in, smartly dressed and very sophisticated. He was very much a businessman as well as an artist: he grasped quite quickly that you could stick the image on yogurt pots and T-shirts I oversee all the Mr Men and Little Miss merchandising. In the UK there are over 80 companies making Mr Men products and all design suggestions are sent to us for approval. Mr Men are embedded in my psyche now – I can spot one from hundreds of yards away.Adam is quite pernickety about how things are done; he likes everything to be right.

I know that he worked, almost obsessively, teaching himself to draw in Dad’s Mr Men style. The drawings look so simple, but creating them involves real skill. I think Dad would have carried on with the Mr Men and been keen to pursue merchandising avenues. But Adam and I are always asking each other “What do you think Dad would say?” and in general I’m sure he’d be pleased with us.I’ve gone through three phases with Adam First he was my annoying brother. When Dad died Adam had a fatherly role; it was Adam who gave me away at my wedding And now, through working with him, we’ve become friends I’ve finally got to know him and that’s great.. In little huddles, thrashing out deals in the literary rights section of the annual London Book Fair yesterday, the agent armed with a narrative non-fiction proposal was king. In little huddles, thrashing out deals in the literary rights section of the annual London Book Fair yesterday, the agent armed with a narrative non-fiction proposal was king.
John Baker, of Publishers Weekly, said the appetite for the genre was still very strong.

The vogue began with the publication of the best-selling Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, the story of an ill-fated Everest expedition, and The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger, now a Hollywood movie.If your previously untold, gripping true story has a disastrous ending, all the better, Mr Baker said. And if it took place on an expedition to the Arctic or Antarctic, you could be sitting on a gold mine, though Second World War settings are also a winner. The love affair with all things 1939 to 1945 continues, confirmed by the recent purchase of Reuben’s War – the wartime memoir of a Polish Jew – for six figures by the publishing firm Random House.But the great British book phenomenon of recent years is not of the doom-and-reality type J K Rowling’s Harry Potter is fanciful and magical. Tucked in a corner, at the back of the book fair at Olympia, west London, yesterday, the American publisher Ottenheimer was touting the British and other foreign rights to the Larry Potter series by Nancy Stouffer. Stouffer is suing Rowling in the American courts for plagarism.It was spooky looking at Larry on the shelf – with the familiar messy black hair and spectacles – apparently conceived 15 years before the much more successful and lucrative Harry.

Even the strap line above the first Larry Potter title, The Legend of Rah and the Muggles – which proclaims the presence of the “original Muggles” – seemed provocative, given that Rowling and Stouffer are still to slog out in court Stouffer’s claim that she invented the Muggles.Still, all the publicity cannot be doing Stouffer any harm. According to Allan Hirsh of Ottenheimer, Stouffer spent most of last week on television and in the newspapers discussing the court case.”She’s big news in America,” he said. “She was on Good Morning America and Inside Edition, and in The New York Times and The Washington Post.” He rattles off more shows in a list of media appearances so long that it reduces the publicity-shy Rowling to a near-recluse.Mr Hirsh says Stouffer was also busy writing new Larry Potter books and that four would be published in the autumn. Some of the titles on display yesterday were just that – titles The words to go with them are still being written. “Nancy Stouffer wasn’t at all well known before this but she is now,” Mr Hirsh said. It is his dearest hope that Stouffer will become a bestselling author as Rowling has.Flicking through The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, the content seems very different from Harry Potter and is aimed at much younger children Mr Hirsh does not disagree. “She’s not saying that the stories are the same, just the characters and some of the settings.” Stouffer and Larry Potter shared the back of the hall with a handful of international software companies, keen to persuade publishing that electronic books are the future.