Jan Pieńkowski: Polish Roots of the Meg and Mog Illustrator
Jan Pieńkowski (1936-2022) drew the pictures for the Meg and Mog books and made Haunted House, one of the best-known pop-up books published in Britain. He was born in Warsaw and reached Herefordshire at the age of ten, a year after the war ended.
In English publishing the name usually appears without the accent, as Jan Pienkowski.
Who was Jan Pieńkowski?
Pieńkowski was born in Warsaw in 1936, the son of Jerzy, a farm manager, and Wanda, a scientist. From 1944 the family moved through Bavaria, Austria and Italy, and in 1946 they reached Herefordshire. He died on 19 February 2022, aged 85.
After Lucton School in Herefordshire and Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in London, he went up to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1954 to read English and Classics.
The Polish childhood behind a British publishing career
The family settled at Barons Cross Camp in Leominster. Jan spoke no English when he arrived but passed the eleven-plus a year later. During the war a Polish insurgent had shown him how to make paper cut-outs while they sheltered from an air raid, and he went on to use the technique in more than 150 picture books.
Our guide to Polish migration to the UK explains the different historical settings in which families arrived. Pieńkowski’s childhood belongs to a different period from the much later migration associated with Poland’s entry into the European Union.
Meg and Mog: who wrote the words and drew the pictures?
The Meg and Mog books paired Helen Nicoll’s words with Pieńkowski’s pictures: Nicoll was the author and Pieńkowski the illustrator.
Meg is a witch, Mog her cat and Owl their friend. The stories use a small cast, very short text and bold, flat shapes, so a child can follow what happens from the pictures alone.
The first book appeared in 1972. Penguin published a fiftieth-anniversary edition in 2022, the year Pieńkowski died, and the characters were later adapted for television and the stage.
Haunted House and the possibilities of a pop-up book
Haunted House was his most successful book. Leominster Museum records sales of more than a million copies in 13 languages. It was one of about twenty pop-up books he made, among them Robot, Dinner Time and Good Night. His Kate Greenaway Medal came for an earlier, flat book, The Kingdom Under the Sea (1971), a collection of Eastern European fairy tales retold by Joan Aiken.
Silhouettes, theatre and recognition in Britain
Pieńkowski’s work went well beyond picture books. With his agent Angela Holder he founded the Gallery Five greeting cards company, and in 1969 he designed a trophy for the Booker Prize. He also designed for the stage, including Beauty and the Beast for the Royal Ballet.
In 2019 he received the BookTrust Lifetime Achievement Award, which King’s College reported as recognition of books read by several generations of British children.
Searching for Pieńkowski and checking book records
Search library catalogues under both Pieńkowski and Pienkowski, ideally with a book title or a collaborator’s surname to filter out other people of the same name.
The same thing happens to family surnames: a Polish diacritic often disappears in British documents without anyone choosing a new name. Our guide to Polish names in British records shows the usual patterns.
If your family also has a Polish-born child who grew up in post-war Britain, the history of Polish London explains the community institutions around them, and our research service can follow the line back into Polish records.