The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast

Alan Aldridge (1938-2017) was a British illustrator, graphic designer, and author best known for psychedelic artwork on album covers for The Beatles, The Who, and Elton John, as well as Penguin science fiction book covers; his notable literary works include The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics (1969) and The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast (1973, verses by William Plomer), which won the Whitbread Children's Book Award. William Plomer (1903-1973) was a South African-born British novelist, poet, and literary editor whose debut Turbott Wolfe (1925) controversially addressed interracial love; he wrote librettos for Benjamin Britten's operas like Gloriana and received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (1963) and CBE (1968), also collaborating on the Whitbread-winning Butterfly Ball.