Let’s Find Out About The Moon by Martha and Charles Shapp (Grolier International Inc, 1965)

As a belated contribution to last weekend’s big anniversary, here are Martha and Charles Shapp and Yukio Tashiro’s impressions of a prospective moon landing, as rendered four years before it actually happened. (I particularly love the cubist Lunar Lander and the big water tank in scan # 7.)

I found a stash of these ‘Let’s Find Out About..’ books in a bar / bookshop in Koenji, Tokyo this year. They were all pretty wonderful – and have the BEST old book smell - but sadly for space reasons I could only take a few of them home with me. The Moon, of course, made the cut.

I’m sorry the scans are a bit wonky – size, shape and hardback binding made this a difficult one to cram onto the scanner without damaging the book, but I think they just about came out ok.

Ghosts of Derbyshire by Clarence Daniel (Dalesman Books, 1977)

To mark both Halloween next week and the proper onset of Autumn this weekend… Derbyshire, ladies and gents.

One of my less noble ambitions tin life to try to one day collect enough of these regional ‘ghosts of..’ / ‘haunted..’ / ‘mysterious..’ books to cover the entirety of the UK. I think I have a lot of the more obvious ones, but less exciting / evocative parts of the country can be hard to find, so I was thrilled to be able to tick Derbyshire off the list.

In addition to the usual round of spectral hounds and ladies in white, this particular area of the midlands seems notable for a lot of funny business involving skulls, and, if Clarence Daniel is to be believed, a frankly suspicious abundance of bad local poets, all dedicated to commemorating supernatural events using a fairly similar meter. You can draw your own conclusions.

It's Fun to Read

Originally published 1971 to accompany the Telly For Schools series.  Loads of details here: Broadcast for Schools

Stranger Than Tomorrow: Three Stories of the Future by Jan Carew (Longman, 1976)

Brought to you from the ever fertile “stuff I found on the street in boxes of abandoned books” file.

It's well worth magnifying these scans to read the text.

I’m not 100% sure this book was written by this Jan Carew, as it seems a little bit out of his line, but I hope it was.

"Watch out guv, 'es got an annual!"

I suspect that some Found Objects partisans might be interested in a set of scans from the 1978 Sweeney annual, which I posted this morning on my own blog, so just thought I'd do a quick post to alert them.

Featuring amongst other things: a photograph of Dennis Waterman being hit in the knackers with a two by four, and a pin-up of an exuberant John Thaw holding what looks like a choc-ice. As is only right and proper.

Total Community.

(H.G. Walters Publishers, Tenby, 1975 / Second (Paperback) Edition, 1982)