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GOOD MEMORIES:There are few items as evocative as the books we used to read in childhood, and a new book celebrating the 70th anniversary of Puffin is a veritable time machine. Perfect nostalgia, writes ROSITA BOLAND

THE BOOKS YOU read in childhood stay with you for a lifetime. Or those that I read did, anyway. The experience of being able to read alone is such a gloriously fresh one as a child that the books that go through your hands at that time also remain in your mind. The books I had in childhood have also literally stayed with me ever since – I kept most of them and reread favourites from time to time. Who says children's books are only for children? The best stories always have the power of engagement across the generations, whether it's Charlotte's Web, A Little Princess, Tom's Midnight Garden, The Phoenix and the Carpet, The Dark is Rising, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Long Winteror Fantastic Mr Fox.

The above titles have all got one thing in common, apart from being wonderful books. They are all published by Puffin, which celebrates its 70th anniversary this year. Puffin By Design: 70 Years of Imagination 1940-2010, is the lovely book that records how the publishing company’s cover designs changed as the decades passed. To leaf through its pages is to immediately start time travelling to the past.

Covers are always potent points of contact with your memory of a book, but perhaps uniquely so as a child. Once you’re beyond picture-book age, the covers are usually the only colour image of the book. They get looked at so much that thereafter they lodge firmly in the consciousness. There is something hugely satisfying about rediscovering the particular edition of the book you read and its still-familiar cover.

As a child, I knew nothing about design, but I knew what I liked. I did not like the photo covers popular in the 1970s for film and television tie-ins. My copy of Noel Streatfield’s The Growing Summer has a canary-yellow filter, laid over a still from the 1969 London Weekend Television series – which I never saw, living in RTÉ1-land. I didn’t want to be presented with photographs of the characters in the books I read; I wanted to imagine them for myself.

What I loved were the beautiful, intricate drawings by Pauline Baynes, who illustrated the Narnia books, The Hobbit, The Borrowers,and Watership Down. I inherited my brother's collection of Arthur Ransome, and was intrigued by Ransome's simple, stylised, spiky drawings of semaphore signals, stick people and angular boats. They looked as if they had been done by a child, as if I could do them myself. And if I could do drawings like those, perhaps I could even try writing stories, too. My favourite was Ransome's Winter Holiday, which I ritually read every winter of my childhood in the west of Ireland, always longing for an accompanying atmospheric blizzard that never came.

Edward Ardizzone's covers – Stig of the Dump, The Land of Green Ginger,Eleanor Farjeon's Book – were marvels of sepia, atmosphere and cross-hatching that I loved to look at because they somehow made me feel as if I was seeing the story in three dimensions. Jan Pienkowski's silhouette covers for Joan Aiken's stories were thrilling, scary and jewel-like all at once.

The Ahlbergs weren't publishing when I was a child, but I had the pleasure of later reading their stories to my nieces and nephews, ransacking the contents of the tiny envelopes of The Jolly Postmanand The Jolly Christmas Postmanwith at least as much delight as they did.

But in some way, the covers in Puffin by Design that are most evocative to me are not of books at all. They are from Puffin Posts, a quarterly magazine of the Puffin Club that Puffin published from 1967 until the 1980s. It was a genius idea for the time: a magazine for children, partially written and illustrated by children. Other content included author and illustrator interviews, specially commissioned stories and artwork from Puffin authors. And there were competitions for poems, riddles, rhymes, stories, with tiny cash prizes and the huge prize of publication. I never cashed the 25p sterling postal-order I received for a poem Puffin Post published, because a kind relative informed me it would cost more to convert it to Irish currency than the 25p was worth.

The force behind Puffin Post was inspired editor Kaye Webb, with whom I had a correspondence throughout my childhood. I wrote to her; she wrote back. How on earth did she have the time, I marvel now, utterly amazed. Later, when I lived in London, I visited Webb often at her home in Maida Vale. She had Pauline Baynes’s original artwork of The Last Battle in her dining room which, as a portal to the world of Narnia was about as good as it gets.

At Webb’s 80th birthday party in Claridges, which Puffin gave for her, I sat beside the great Baynes herself and thanked her for giving me so much pleasure as a child. I don’t know who dreamed up the slogan, but there really is “nuffin’ like a Puffin”.

Puffin by Design: 70 Years of Imagination 1940-2010, by Phil Baines, is published by Penguin, £20