Little Golden Book Monday #183

Here is the most recent Disney related Little Golden Book. It is It's a Small World! adapted by Lauren Clauss, illustrated by Steph Lew and designed by Winnie Ho, with a publication date of 2021. I love seeing Disneyland attractions being adapted into Little Golden Books, and am excited about the upcoming Jungle Cruise and Haunted Mansion books coming out later in the year. Shown here are the front and back covers, along with a few of the wonderful interior illustrations.

Batman's Dostoyevsky Comics

Here is a Batman story you have probably never seen before. Its from Masterpiece comics (Where classics and cartoons collide!) by R. Sikoryak, first edition 2009. One of the stories in the book is this one titled "Crime and Punishment!"

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit Club Membership Card

Sometimes I find myself obsessed with the idea of something or other. Recently I was thinking about Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and how interesting it would have been if Walt Disney had not lost the rights to this character and had built his media empire on the back of Oswald instead of Mickey.
In the 2005 Disney Editions book "The Disney Keepsakes" by Robert Tieman, there is a replica of a Mickey Mouse Club membership card from 1929. The front of the card shows a smiling Mickey Mouse and lists the club chapter number and name, and has a space for the members name to be written along with a membership number. There is also a place for "Chief Mickey Mouse" to sign the card. The back of the card has the Mickey Mouse Club Creed:
I will be a square shooter in my home, in school, on the playgrounds, where-ever I may be.
I will be truthful and honorable and strive, always, to make myself a better and more useful little citizen.
I will respect my elders and help the aged, the helpless and children smaller than myself.
In short, I will be a good American!
After seeing this, I started thinking about what it would have looked like if there was no Mickey Mouse and instead we had an Oswald Club. I took a photo I found online of a Mickey Mouse Membership Card and turned it into an Oswald Club Membership Card which now has a spot in my collection! It makes me smile every time I see it there displayed amongst my other official Disney collectables.

Caroline's Wonderful Journey

Here is another Caroline book by Pierre Probst. This one is Caroline's Wonderful Journey from 1966. This copy is printed and mad ein Great Britain by Wm. Collins & Sons & Co. Ltd, 1972.
I love these oversized 9 x 12 inch books with their wonderful full page artwork. Its so much fun to flip through and take in all the amazingly fun artwork. I Spent some time and scanned the cover along with 4 of my favorite images from inside the book. Enjoy. And be sure to click on them to see them at full size.

I Love my Local Library

I have always loved visiting my local library. I have always loved to check out the books in the entertainment / arts section. As a young kid, I would looking for books on magic, as a young adult I was looking for books on animation, and then it was books on Disney. I have always loved magazines, and since I can't afford to buy them all, the library has been a great resource to get all those magazines I want to read, but don't necessarily need to purchase. There are tons of graphic novels. Once I had a son, I started spending lots of time in the children's section. Now that video stores are pretty much a thing of the past, the library has become a great place to get movies... for free!
A number of years ago, I got an app for my iMac called Library Books from Harold Chu. Its one of the best apps on my Mac. It always sits at the top of my Macs menu bar and reminds me how many books I have out, let me know when books are due back by changing colour and lets me know when my requests are ready to be picked up. For just a few bucks on the Apple App Store it has saved me tons of late fees!

Another great feature of the app is that it makes is super simple to make a few clicks and do a search of books available though the library system and then place a hold on them. Once they show up, the app icon will turn green to alert you that you have an item to pick up. Most recently I have ordered Walt Disney's Imagineering Legends a great book by Jeff Kurtti, and the Hidden Magic of Walt Disney World, which is a great read! I also just picked up seasons 1, 2 & 3 of Anamaniacs which I am excited to share with my son. I am currently on the last disc of the IT Crowd season 3.
Our local libraries are also adding lots of new programs. This coming spring break, they are adding movie nights, a kite making session, board game nights (complete with pizza and snacks), Lego building sessions and more.
For those of you who have not been to a library in years, you may want to check it out again!

Bill Peet's Countdown To Christmas

If you have been reading my blog for any amount of time, you may remember that I am a big Bill Peet fan. I started collecting his books long before there was an internet, and back before Amazon and eBay, you had to go to your local book store to have them look stuff up for you. Once I had access to the internet, I started buying the Bill Peet books I was missing from my collection. I am not sure how I had totally missed this particular title, but I happened to see the cover of this book on line and I realized immediately that it was by Bill Peet, and that I didn't already own it. A quick visit to eBay and I had a copy of Countdown To Christmas in my hands a few weeks later. My copy comes from the Virginia Beach Public Library System, Kempsville Area Library. The book is from 1972 and is written and illustrated by Bill Peet. It was very enjoyable to have a Bill Peet book to read that was completely new to me. I had read all of his other books so many times as a kid, that this one was unexpected treat.

Weihnachten in den Bergen

I picked up this 1978 children's book last summer and put it aside for closer to Christmas, which is now! The book is not in English, so I had no idea what it was called, but I really loved the cover artwork. A quick Google search and I found out that Weihnachten is the German observance of what is commonly known in English as Christmas Day. I love that the front cover shows six children in a horse drawn sleigh on their way to some really fun Weihnachten type event, and then on the back cover, we see them on their way back home a little while latter. We know that just an hour or so has passed by the movement of the moon across the sky.

Heckle and Jeckle Visit the Farm

Yesterday we visited a few of our local thrift shops and I came home with some really neat stuff including this Wonder Book, Heckle and Jeckle Visit the Farm. The copyright for the book is 1958, but this particular edition is from 1983. I have always been a fan of Heckle and Jeckle and back when I used to still get up early to watch cartoons, I used to get pretty excited when they would toss in a Heckle and Jeckle cartoon in the mix of usual Bugs Bunny, Casper and Popeye cartoons. I can also remember back in the 80's before VCRs became popular, you could actually pay to see cartoons in a little cartoon hut at the mall. Once I got this book, it got me to thinking about those little cartoon huts. I can remember that they had one in the Surrey Place Mall and than when I was working at the A&A Records and Tapes shop, I would use my breaks to run over to the Sears, where they had one such cartoon hut in their stairwell leading out to the parking lot. For just a quarter, you could sit and watch a full length (roughly six minutes) cartoon. I loved it because it only played Terry Toons and your odds of seeing a Heckle and Jeckle cartoon were pretty good.
After a short Google search, I found this guys site where he showed off his very own original Kiddierama Theatre. Be sure to check out his site to see who these things actually worked. Now a days, a quick YouTube search will instantly bring up a whole bunch of Heckle and Jeckle cartoons to view in the comfort of your own home. Pretty amazing to think back and realize how much things have changed in just 30 years.

Homer and the Circus Train

I Just got a copy of Homer and the Circus Train by Hardie Gramatky. My wife was visiting her nephew, and in the lobby of the building was a bookcase with magazines and children's books. She noticed this one and instantly knew I would love it. She took a photo with her iPhone and sent it to me. As she guessed, I loved it. On her next trip to visit her nephew, I went along with a pile of books from my collection (all extras) and asked if I could trade my pile of books for the copy of Homer and the Circus Train. The woman made some jokes about how the book was probably worth lots of money etc, but was convinced to let me trade when she saw that one of the books I had brought was a brand new copy of Green Eggs and Ham which she said was her favorite. I went home with my new treasure. The book is from 1957 and was part of the Greater Victoria Public Library collection before becoming a discard. The book was written by Hardie Gramatky who also wrote Little Toot, another favorite of mine. The list in the back of the book also lists other books by Hardie Gramatky: Little Toot, Hercules, Loopy, Sparky, Bolivar, Nikos and the Sea God, Little Toot on the Thames, Little Toot on the Grand Canal, and Happy's Christmas.
This book features Homer a little circus train who looks a little bit like a few other cabooses I have featured on my blog previously. I absolutely love the artwork throughout the book and this one has made me want to search for more of Hardie's books, especially Sparky, which is about a little trolley car that looks very similar to Homer, except that he is yellow instead of red.

Caroline's Party & at the Seaside

A few weeks ago I found two more of these wonderful Caroline books (by Pierre Probst) at a used book shop. Each book was $4, which is slightly more than I like to pay for used books, but I liked the artwork so much that I was willing to pay the $8 to add these two new books to my collection. First off if Caroline's Party originally from 1953, this printing is from 1972. The second book is Caroline At the Seaside, originally from 1965, this printing is also from 1972. The illustrations are absulutly whimsical. I decided to take a few photos (the pages were much too big for my scanner) to share here on my blog. Hope you enjoy!

Goofy and the Tiger Hunt

Here I present one of my all time favorite Disney book covers "Goofy ant eh Tiger Hunt".
After Monday's Little Golden Book post, I decided to pull out this book from the Disney display case in my office. The tiger in the Goliath II book reminded me of the tiger on the cover of this book. In my mind they were identical. Now that I have the Goofy and the Tiger Hunt book in front of me, I see that although they are both tigers, they are not that similar. But, since I had already pulled this book out, and it is one of my favorite Disney items in my collection, I thought I would share it with you today.
This book is from 1954 and is based on the 1945 short "Tiger Trouble". I decided to pull out my Walt Disney Treasures DVD "The Complete Goofy" to watch the Tiger Trouble short, which it turns out is written by Bill Peet, which makes me appreciate this book even more.

Disneyland's Summer Nightastic!

With Disneyland's Nightastic! opening up this summer, I have been seeing lots of Nightastic artwork on the net, and they all feature the two Disney dragons from Fantasmic and Pete's Dragon. Here is the recent covers of the free guides at Disneyland and California Adventure withe the Disneyland guide featuring the dragon from Fantasmic and the California Adventure one featuring Pete's Dragon from the Main Street Electrical Parade.
I have always loved the dragon from Sleeping Beauty (my favorite Disney animated film), and Fantasmic is a favorite of mine. When I was at Disneyland back in 1992 when the show opened, I picked up a very cool Fantasmic! soft cover book for $5.95. The book is 8 1/2 inches square and has 26 pages, and and the front cover folds out with 3 panels to reveal a great drawing of Mickey battling the dragon. Inside is a nice pictorial souvenir of the show along with the story behind the show.
The inside fold out has a great 2 page drawing which looks like it may have been a promotional sign promoting Fantasmic, with the words "Opening Spring '92".

Family Circus... What a Mess!

The wife has gone out of town for the weekend and left Kaden and I to look after ourselves... Amazing how much of a mess an old guy and a 4 year old can make in just two days! We've played with our Hot Wheels cars and race track, we've played with just about every superhero action figure ever made, we've played with our vintage set of Lincoln Logs, we've sat around reading piles of comic books, we've watched a ton of cartoons on Teletoon Retro, and now the house looks a lot like the covers of these two old Family Circus books.

Tell-A-Tale Books Day 1

I recently found a large stash of really cool old Tell-A-Tale books at local thrift shop. I don't see these very often on my thrift shop visits, so to see two full book shelves of them was pretty amazing. And at just 10 cents each, I grabbed a couple handfulls! I will post the covers of some of my favorites over the next few days.
Here are the first four books; Dennis the Menace Takes the Cake from 1987, We're Busy, Charlie Brown from 1988, Richochet Rabbit Showdown at Gopher Gulch Bakery from 1964 and The Road Runner and the Bird Watchers from 1973.