Monday, February 10, 2020

Little Golden Book Monday #181

While at the thrift store the other day I found two copies of the Little Golden Book, Donald Duck's Toy Sailboat. Once I had both in hand, I realized the covers were actually slightly different. I prefer the Donald on the newer edition, but think the chipmunks on the older one are much better. What do you think?

Here are scans of the covers as well as the inside page from both versions.
The first one is the Fourteenth Printing from 1975. The second one is from 1990.

Little Golden Book, Walt Disney

Little Golden Book, Walt Disney

Little Golden Book, Chip and Dale

Little Golden Book, Chip and Dale

2 comments:

DBenson said...

Would be interesting to know if other old Golden Books had cover updates. Here it seems to be an effort to lose the "old fashioned" fonts and illustrative style and match Donald Duck to the current model.

Cover updates are a long-standing tradition. I've seen reprints of late 1800s Horatio Alger stories with cover art placing the hero in a "present day" setting (that is, the 1920s and even 1930s). The texts themselves remain unchanged, firmly rooted in the post Civil War era.

As a kid in the early 60s I remember DC Comics's "80 Page Giants", with the latest versions of Batman or Superman presiding over the cover while the content would be decidedly dated postwar stories.

Ronn Roxx said...

It's kinda funny because I had both of these and had obviously seen both covers, just not at the same time, so had never noticed they were different.

As for comic books, the old bait and switch with a great cover artist and terrible interior art was a think when I was a kid and still happens today all the time!