A Picture Puffin for you today - The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack and Kurt Wiese, first publishing in 1933. In case you don't know it - every day, Ping and his family are taken by their owner to feed on the river bank, and every day when they are getting back on the boat, Ping is spanked for being last. One day he decides to hide out to escape his fate and inevitably gets lost.
Marjorie Flack was actually an artist as well as a writer, and she wrote and illustrated several other children's picture books. You might wonder why Flack didn't illustrate Ping herself, but Kurt Wiese had lived and travelled in China for six years, so was perhaps considered a better choice. And to be fair, he does do a good job of capturing a spirit of the place and time.
Ping may have been last on the boat every night, but he was a first for Puffin - the first book in their new Picture Puffins Series (PX) in 1968. The Picture Puffins were the successor to the original series of Picture books (PP), which ran from 1940 to 1965. Where the original series focused mainly on non fiction, the Picture Puffins focused more on fiction, and introduced such classics as The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Each Peach Pear Plum. Though Ping didn't become as well known, it is still in print and widely available, almost a hundred years after it was written, and a lot of that is probably down to Puffin.
This was my sister's favourite book when she was little. Many of our other Picture Puffins are now so battered they are almost more sticky tape than book - so this one has actually fared quite well 
Did you have a favourite Picture Puffin?