Say “Ladybird dinosaur book” to someone, and they’ll very likely think of the book illustrated by Bernard Robinson that was reprinted a number of times and spanned the childhoods of multiple generations. (Well, at least two.) I reviewed it all the way back in 2011, so perhaps my review is now as nostalgic for some people as Ladybird books are for others. (Nah, just kidding. I’m not so deluded.) Robinson’s illustrations, while technically superb and highly memorable, were looking rather…
Once again: Marie Hubrecht. Are you tired of me talking about Marie Hubrecht yet? Because I’m not done. If you want more Hubrecht, check out my reviews of Verdwenen Werelden here, here and here, and our Verdwenen Werelden podcast episode here! This post is a direct companion to my last one, in which I detail the time I went to see the spectacular murals she made in the 1920s at the former Girls’ Lyceum in Amsterdam. These paintings have been…
The palaeontologist Dr William Elgin Swinton (W E Swinton to you) is perhaps best known, in the context of popular books about dinosaurs at least, for works published by the Natural History Museum (or the British Museum (Natural History) as it then properly was) that featured artwork by Neave Parker. I reviewed such a book back in 2011, a rather dry affair filled with strange ideas that must have seemed a little outdated even at the time. However, it’d be…
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…
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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.