We’re back with more German dinosaur cards from the Reichardt cocoa company! In parts one and two, we discussed two series of 1900s illustrations by one F. John. In the late 1910s, Reichardt once again hit the market with collectible cards themed to extinct animals. Incidentally, after Series 1 and Series 2, the third series was numbered Series 1a, because that’s what makes the most sense. The original featured artist, F. John, was, not to put too fine a point…
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…
Have you seen our last post about these cards? Blog statistics tell me you mostly haven’t, so make sure to read it here. Today, I want to take you again to the wonderful, whimsical, slightly puzzling, occasionally grotesque prehistoric world of the enigmatic F. John, who exists only as a signature on sixty collectable cards from the Reichardt cocoa company. Quick recap: in the early 1900s, Reichardt released two series of thirty collectable cards with illustrations of prehistoric animals. All…
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…
You know how we’re always reviewing books that are so big that our scanners have trouble with them? We always have to scrape our images together from two, sometimes four, separate scans. It’s getting tiresome. Let’s do a small book. I found a book that is absolutely teeny tiny, smaller than my hand. Scanning this one was no trouble at all, look. The scan probably appears bigger on your screen than the real thing. I’ve said nothing at all about…
A while ago we had a look at Extinct Monsters, a book from 1892 by H. N. Hutchinson and illustrated by Joseph Smit. Now, we’re going all the way to 1910 for the the new, revised, expanded edition of Extinct Monsters by the same author, that reflects almost two decades of scientific discovery. This new version of the book is the one that has the awesome extended title “…and Creatures of Other Days“. The ageing Joseph Smit, Dutchman in England,…
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…
Whenever I’ve reviewed books from the United States in the past, it’s tended to be because a kind reader has either scanned their pages, or simply sent me the whole thing via international mail. (Thanks again, Herman!) This one, however, turned up rather unexpectedly on eBay, sold by an online second-hand bookshop in the UK. It’s part of the ‘Honey Bear Books’ series published by Modern Publishing (“a division of Unisystems, Inc.” of New York), which appears to have been…
Greetings my good sir or madam or otherwise! Hark, I come bearing joyful tidings! Have you heard the good news? Although this copy comes from 1994, The News About Dinosaurs was originally wirtten as early as 1989 by Patricia Lauber. Patricia Lauber (1924-2010) was a prolific American science writer for children, and this book is all about her excitement for the Dinosaur Renaissance. As the title suggests, it is a book relaying all the new insights that had been coming…
It’s been almost four years since I had the bright idea to review the Eyewitness Dinosaur video, a factual short film that was a treasured childhood possession (and something I’ve actually managed to hold onto, which I’m happy about even if it’s on a totally obsolete format and the film is now readily available online. So there). In the interim, I’ve been made aware of another kid-friendly dino-factual VHS that emerged from the UK over a decade prior – in…
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Chasmosaurus belli silhouette in custom bulleted list by Scott D. Sampson, Mark A. Loewen, Andrew A. Farke, Eric M. Roberts, Catherine A. Forster, Joshua A. Smith, and Alan L. Titus, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sourced from PhyloPic.