Browsing Tag

1970s

Podcast Show Notes: Episode 35 – Snowball and the Raptor Boys

Podcast Show Notes June 30, 2024

We’ve had a month off, but the famous LITC podcast is back in full strength with more fresh news, nostalgic art reviews and exciting interviews! After discussing the new films and documentaries that are coming our way, we review some very English palaeoart from the late 1970s by the unsung Peter Snowball. After that, Natee and Marc interview the Golden Boys of Dromaeosaurs, 3D sculptor Ruadhrí Brennan and returning LITC interviewee Jed Taylor, whose incredible Velociraptor sculpts have set last…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs (A Golden World Explorer Book)

Vintage Dinosaur Art January 8, 2024

The most well-known Golden Book to feature dinosaurs is undoubtedly The Big Golden Book of Dinosaurs, also released in the guise of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals (which was the edition I happened to review on this blog, back before some of you were born, probably). So memorable was that Zallinger-illustrated classic that Robert Bakker and Luis Rey deemed it worthy of a remake, published in 2013. Besides that, there was of course the very memorable Little Golden Book, packed…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Prehistoric Creatures (Benwig Painting and Colouring Book No. 6)

Vintage Dinosaur Art December 8, 2023

We haven’t featured too many colouring books on LITC – Victoria Arbour reviewed the Jurassic Park one for us back in 2018, and they popped up a few times in David’s seasonal gift guides (back when he was still doing those), but that’s really the sum of it. I am therefore rather happy to present Prehistoric Creatures, number 6 in the Benwig Painting and Colouring Book series, published by Benwig Books in 1971. Until I find the colouring book full…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Prehistoric Animals (Purnell Library of Knowledge)

Vintage Dinosaur Art October 16, 2023

Purnell’s prehistoric animal books of the 1970s – of which there were several, of varying quality (as mostly featured on LITC Mk 1) – attract a great deal of nostalgic fondness from people, uh, a little older than me. The fact that their output seemed to dry up from the 1980s onwards becomes a lot more explicable when one learns of how the company fell into the hands of notorious crook and amateur yachtsman Robert ‘Cap’n Bob’ Maxwell, and consequently…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Giant Dinosaurs

Vintage Dinosaur Art August 23, 2023

As a slim paperback from the 1970s aimed at very young, beginner readers, and published by Scholastic, you might well expect Giant Dinosaurs to be yet another book filled with Charles Knight knock-offs. And about half of it is. However, the other half features – quite unexpectedly – amusing cartoons of dinosaurs being a nuisance in the modern world. It’s making learning fun! Giant Dinosaurs was first published in 1973, with this edition arriving in 1979. Erna Rowe wrote the…

Podcast Show Notes: Episode 23 – Invicta Toys and Rebecca Dart

Podcast Show Notes January 31, 2023

Our first episode of 2023 celebrates classics of two different kinds: the masterly palaeoart of the Queen of #DrawDinovember, Rebecca Dart, which surely merits the stamp of ‘modern classic’; and, in what Niels has determined is a one-off for us and not the beginning of a foray into collectibles, the enduring charm of the Invicta dinosaur toys commissioned by London’s Natural History Museum, beginning in 1974. How does Rebecca work her timeless magic on her snapshots of deep time, and…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Before the Ark

Vintage Dinosaur Art October 28, 2022

Described as “a collection of widely differing essays around a central theme,” Before the Ark was published in 1975 by the BBC and “based upon the BBC Television series” of the same name. Said series has seemingly disappeared into complete obscurity, although it does get a mention on Alan Charig’s Wikipedia page, and I also found this listing in the BBC Programme Index. (It’s not on YouTube, though, and if you do try searching for it, you’ll come across an…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Sea Monsters of Long Ago

Vintage Dinosaur Art September 28, 2022

Mesozoic marine reptiles have been popular subjects in illustration since the Dawn of Palaeoart, with artists keen to emphasise their monstrous strangeness and savagery, and the primordial nature of the world they lived in. Such is most definitely the case here, in 1977’s Sea Monsters of Long Ago (clue’s in the title), published by Scholastic Book Services, written by Millicent E Selsam, and illustrated by John Hamberger. (Mmm…Hamberger.) Although this is a book clearly aimed at young children, Hamberger doesn’t…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: The World of Dinosaurs – Part 3

Vintage Dinosaur Art September 8, 2022

This one goes out to Ben Hillier, who both wins the coveted Reader of the Month award* and shall be treated to various non-dinosaurs from 1977’s The World of Dinosaurs (see parts one and two). As befits the book’s title, here are a couple of animals from, er, the Permian. That’s right – it’s everyone’s favourite synapsid menace Dimetrodon, alongside Diadectes, which was certainly a tetrapod. Yes. As is tradition, Dimetrodon is shown inhabiting an arid, upland landscape, quite unlike…

Vintage Dinosaur Art: The World of Dinosaurs – Part 2

Vintage Dinosaur Art August 18, 2022

My first post on this book was almost entirely dedicated to theropods (the best dinosaurs) – so we’d best now turn our attention to Everything Else. As discussed last time, the artwork here (credited to Wilcock Riley Graphic Art) is mostly fairly typical, and often even quite good, for the time in which was produced (i.e. 1977). But the artists do manage to make the odd strange turn here and there… Behold: Styracosaurus, but it’s a rhino now. As in,…

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