The book collection of the creator of The Snowman and Fungus the Bogeyman has gone on sale at Oxfam’s Hove bookshop in East Sussex and online.

More than 1,000 books from the collection of Raymond Briggs, the beloved British author and cartoonist, were donated by his estate after his death aged 88 in 2022.

Briggs’s personal library spans comics, illustration, novels and social history, including works by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz and Winnie-the-Pooh illustrator EH Shepard as well as a signed first edition of Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World, the 2005 book composed of fragments from women’s magazines.

Other illustrators featured in Briggs’s library include Shirley Hughes, Aubrey Beardsley, Edward Gorey and Posy Simmonds. There are about 30 comic annuals from the 50s, offering “a glimpse into the visual world that shaped Briggs’s style”, according to Oxfam.

“What’s fascinating is the range,” said Oxfam Hove bookshop volunteer Martin Hill. “You begin to see connections between the books Briggs created and the books and artists he chose to have around him.”

“There are great illustrators and cartoonists, but then you find books about ageing, bathrooms, domestic life, old annuals and wartime milkmen,” he added. “It is serious, funny, ordinary and sometimes rather dark – which feels very familiar to anyone who knows Briggs’s work.”

The collection includes pamphlets on nuclear disarmament, a subject explored in Briggs’s 1982 graphic novel When the Wind Blows. A 1974 book by Monty Python’s Terry Jones and Michael Palin, Bert Fegg’s Nasty Book for Boys and Girls, is also listed, along with a set of John Constable’s reproduced sketches and a first edition copy of Riddley Walker, the post-apocalyptic novel by Russell Hoban.

Born in Wimbledon in 1934, Briggs later spent more than 50 years living beneath the South Downs near Hove. The area inspired the 1978 picture book The Snowman, which features Brighton’s Royal Pavilion. Briggs taught illustration at Brighton School of Art from the early 60s to 1986.

He became known for picture books that subverted conventions of children’s storytelling, in the likes of 1977’s Fungus the Bogeyman and 1973’s Father Christmas, which imagines a cantankerous Santa Claus.

“I liked to find fantastical creatures and treat them realistically,” said Briggs in an interview with the Guardian in 2019, on the publication of his illustrated memoir Time for Lights Out. “I don’t see any difference between doing children’s and adult books. My attitude is exactly the same. I just do the book as I want it to be.”

The animated adaptation of The Snowman first hit screens in 1982, and has been broadcast almost every Christmas since.

After Briggs’s death, children’s author Michael Rosen said that “we have been lucky to have read and watched such great work from a great artist with a great heart”.

The Oxfam collection “offers a wonderful glimpse of the visual and intellectual world of one of Britain’s most distinctive illustrators”, said Hill. Prices for the books on the online store range from £5.99 to £400 for the first edition of Rawle’s Woman’s World.