I love a good alphabet book. The fact that the author has to find one animal for each letter inevitably means they have to make a lot of choices. Some letters have lots of candidates – Do we put Tyrannosaurus or Triceratops under ‘T”? – which means painful cuts need to be made. Other letters, …
Pangaea, The Mother Continent is one of the most unusual books that has ever found its way to me. It has done so by way of Grant Harding, who sent the scans to me, so full props to him. It came out in 1989, a great year for dinosaurs. It was witten by Karen Liptak …
It’s time for the eleventh episode of the famous LITC podcast! Today, Marc, Niels and Natee discuss perhaps the single most influential book of dinosaur art in the entire world: Predatory Dinosaurs of the World, by one Gregory S. Paul ™. Marc interviews Friend Of The Blog Steve White about his upcoming compendium of Mesozoic …
While I’ve found a great deal of blog fodder on eBay, it’s always immeasurably more pleasurable to spot a book in person, out there in the wild. As it happens, my friend Huseyin actually found this one, amid the glorious chaos of the aptly-named Raining Books shop here in Brighton. Originally published in 1982 in …
Time for another round of The Big Golden Book of Dinosaurs. No, not that one – the one from 1988, written by Mary Elting and illustrated by Christopher Santoro. As an aside, I didn’t say too much about Santoro last time, and I probably should have. He’s an accomplished and much-lauded illustrator of children’s books …
I check the copyright page, and I check it again. 1993? Really? Surely that can’t be true. Surely this book is at least fifteen years newer than that. But no. The proof is right there, undeniable, clear as day. What sorcery is this? Who stole a time machine? How is this book so good? That …
Having done the obligatory theropods, it’s time to take a second look at The Strange World of Dinosaurs, one of those dinosaur books where the author – John Ostrom – is considerably more well-known than the artist. Joseph Sibal’s pencil illustrations, printed in either red or green, are competent and lush and amusingly of their …
The fifth episode of the LITC podcast is here, in which the team ventures off the beaten path into more unusual forms of palaeoart. We discuss a volume of vintage dinosaur art that was ahead of its time in its blending of photography and illustration. For our interview, Natee talks to Rebecca Groom, whose hand-crafted …
We’re back again today with the ecelctic Reuzen Uit De Oertijd, or Discoveries’ Dinosaurs, the Australian not-quite-Eyewitness-level nineties nostalgiavaganza featuring a plethora of works by different artists. Many of you told us you remember this one from your childhoods, so I hope I’m not going to ruin your opinion of it too much. Since last …
It’s the triumphant return of The Giant Book of Dinosaurs, everyone’s fifth or sixth favourite children’s dinosaur book from the 1980s to be written by Mike Benton. As we’ve already examined the book’s theropods, let’s turn now to the lesser dinosaurs that pad out the rest of this irritatingly proportioned book – starting with the …