Vintage dinosaur

A black and white vintage French chart of dinosaurs published by the Librarie Aristide Quillet in Paris France, in the late 1950s. Measuring 7 ¾ x 10 ¾ inches, the paper is in beautiful condition without tears or markings. Each illustration is labelled in French. The reverse side has text from the

Here’s another book found through sheer serendipity while browsing charity shops with a friend – Prehistoric World, written by Richard Moody and published by Hamlyn in 1980. That means …

Five years ago (wait...what?!), I wrote a VDA post on W.E. Swinton's book on dinosaurs for London's Natural History Museum, which featured a number of artworks by Neave Parker. Professor William Elgin Swinton (for it was he) moved to Canada after his stint at (what is now) the NHM, and in 1965 he wrote the book we're looking at here - Dinosaurs of Canada. Neave Parker had, unfortunately, died a few years prior, but his influence is keenly felt in the illustrations by Paul Geraghty, which are…

Nice James E. Allen illustration from the Sinclair Dinosaur Book.

Vintage dinosaur art

Very, very occasionally, when the planets in the Solar System arrange themselves in an apparently haphazard, but in fact entirely co-ordinated and precise pattern, a truly superb and genuinely vintage dinosaur book appears, like a distant, glittering jewel, over the eBay horizon. (The rest of the time, I buy any old rubbish from the '80s and you get lousy filler posts.) The How and Why Wonder Book of Dinosaurs is just such a book. It's also no less than the first dinosaur book owned by a…

So here’s a book that was sent to me by fellow Brit Mark Hollowell (thanks!) – some time ago, actually. I had meant to review it sooner – I’d scanned all the images and uplo…

When I first saw this book I was convinced that it was from the 1970s or, at the very latest, the 1980s. It has every backward trope you care to mention - man-in-suit theropods, blobby, useless sauropods and an utter disregard for, you know, looking at skeletons and doing your research and all that nonsense. In fact the art very closely resembles that found in the '60s book I mocked in my first ever LITC post. But no. It's from 1993. The year of Jurassic Park. Oh dear. It gets worse. The…

Given the quality of the illustrations, I couldn't possibly feature only the dinosaurs from Prehistoric Animals (part of the Private Lives...