the pointless weblog

These editions of these three books were published in 199o and 1991 by Fontana. The cover illustrations are uncredited, but might well be by Clive Barker as well.

The best things in these books are the photos of Clive Barker inside the back covers, where he gets slightly more groomed with every passing year.

I also like this illustration in the inside cover of The Great And Secret Show

And I don’t really know what to make of the terrifying cover to Nightbreed that’s advertised in there at all.

The Terror Cubes was a science fiction book written by Granville Wilson and published by Granada in 1982. The cover was illustrated by Alan Craddock and the book itself was illustrated by Paul Turner.

I haven’t read this book, unfortunately, and have been informed that it is actually “a bit dull”, but the illustrations are absolutely amazing, and not dull at all, so now I don’t know what to think.

Thanks to Phil Alderman for sending me these.

These two puzzles (a 12 piece proper puzzle and a 28 card domino set) were free gifts with the Humpty Dumpty Club, a book club for children run by Hamlyn Publishing in the late 70s. I don’t know who drew them, although they’re quite similar in style to the pictures in Roger and the Elephant, which was illustrated by Lesley Smith and written by John Kershaw.

The Zoo dominoes (which aren’t really dominoes at all) were just about my favourite thing when I was a child. I think the only way they coud have been improved is if they were arranged in a spiral, and also the spiral went on and on outwards forever.

If you click on the picture below you can see them all set out along their lovely squiggly-lined glory.

The Humpty Dumpty Club had a few more gifts available, but if I had any of them they’ve been lost somewhere along the line, except for the Roger and the Elephant book. I think I had the Zoo money box from the advert below, but I can’t be sure.

I also had a few books from the club, the best of which was Tiger-Pig by John Ryan.

And that’s all I know about the Humpty Dumpty Club.

In the late 70s, Patrick Moore wrote a number of children’s science fiction stories about a young astronaut called Scott Saunders. There were six books in total, although I only have three (numbers 1, 2 and 5), unfortunately.

They aren’t very good, unfortunately. One of the best things about them is that half the characters speak exactly like Patrick Moore. The other characters are foreign and inevitably evil. The exciting denouement of The Terror Star - a story that takes in everything from super sentient alien computers to germans, space rays, and the inscrutable expressionlessness of chinese faces - involves a dastardly foreign brute deviously tricking his way to freedom from the honourable english spacemen who thought they had him in their grasp.

My favourite page in all of the books is probably Captain Armada’s appearance at the end. His cheerful face is a beautiful thing.

I also like the way on the covers the books change from An Original Armada to An Armada Original somewhere between book 2 and book 5. I wonder what terrifying event caused this. It is likely we shall never know.

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