What began with an examination of 1994’s Eyewitness Dinosaur video has lead me to this – purchasing a children’s activity pack from eBay. Ah, but not any children’s activity pack, for this one includes warm 1990s nostalgia alongside a pop-out card model, board game and (gasp!) “five facsimile documents”. Yes, it’s the DK ACTION PACK …
As promised, here’s some more from Dinosaur, part of the Eyewitness Guides series, on the occasion of its 30th anniversary – and not a Diplodocus in sight. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the emphasis of this book is definitely not on life reconstructions, which always play second fiddle to gloriously large photographs of fossil specimens. It’s …
Not so long ago, I looked at a book sold under a supermarket brand (in the UK at least), and now here’s one that was published under the banner of the British department store chain, Marks and Spencer. Or at least, under their St Michael sub-brand, which I remember from my childhood, but doesn’t seem …
Although it was during the early 1990s when I first became interested in dinosaurs and dinosaur art, much of what was floating around back then had been produced decades prior. This only intensified when A Certain Movie came along, and everyone rushed out whatever dinosaur-festooned tat and half-hearted books they could to cash in. If …
Never judge a dinosaur book by its cover. The first edition of Naish and Barrett’s Dinosaurs: How They Lived and Evolved, back in 2016, had an eye-wateringly dreadful example of NHM (London) stock image muck on its cover, but the book itself was excellent, as I noted at the time. While the art on The …
There are certain books that you’ll be absolutely certain you’ve seen before, but just can’t quite place where or how. This was just such a book for me. T. R. (Tyrannosaurus rex) & Friends was published in 1988, and would’ve still been hanging around in bookshops when I first got into dinosaurs as a child, …
Welcome back, at long last, to the wonderful world of vintage dinosaur books authored by Professor William Elgin Swinton, typically credited as simply W. E. Swinton. A Scottish palaeontologist who had a berth at the London NHM before moving to Canada, Swinton is probably best known among palaeoart aficionados for writing an official NHM book …
There once existed a publisher named Starfish Books, based in the town of Cobham in Surrey, about 34 miles from where I live (driving via the A23/M23 and M25). They appear to have published children’s books (fiction and non-fiction) back in the 1970s, and then disappeared with very little trace. Whatever became of Starfish Books? …
Let’s finish this thing. I know that everyone loves ’90s Sibbick as much as I do, and is never, ever bothered by the ‘Vintage Dinosaur Art’ series featuring art that’s so relatively recent. And let’s not forget that Herman Diaz went to all the trouble to send this one over from the States. Therefore, there …
Some palaeoart books – many palaeoart books – are monumental hardback affairs, printed on the very sheeniest of glossy paper, sufficiently large that casually reading them on the train to work is quite impossible without drawing attention to yourself. (Not that I speak from personal experience, or anything.) Their pages burst with colour, as awe-inspiringly …