Recovery of the Artifacts - How and Why Wonder Books

More Recherche musings this time the recovery of those artifacts from your childhood that should never have been forsaken or lost.  As with a previous post on the connection of childhood memory empowering hypnosis practices -
http://armourae.blogspot.com/2016/02/le-recherche-hypnosis.html
St Josephs Convent details at -
http://armourae.blogspot.com/2015/12/st-josephs-convent-primary-school.html

http://armourae.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/st-josephs-convent-this-is-reprinted.html


 this reflects on the impact of Affective Memory, those memories which release not only a visual or auditory memory but a whole engagement of all the senses plus an emotional response, which  Strasberg used as the whole basis of his Method Acting (overrated! I will always be an Artaud).

I have recovered copies of my late sister, Bernadette Bazzoni's, How and Why Wonder Books.The originals were disposed of 30 years ago as I had a rapidly expanding book collection which was taking over every piece of space- my mattress rested on a bed of books.
The most important one was the Wild Animals edition.

It wasn't just the contents that made this so valuable, as you can see the artwork in these books was also exceptional.
My sister's copy was battered with pages missing. Don't know if Bernadette or my infancy was responsible.
The other editions that needed to be recovered were the well known Dinosaurs,

  and  Reptiles,Planetary Travel,Magnetism,and Deserts.  The last probably bought by my father as a consequence of the years he spent in North Africa and the Sahara Desert.

Of the above I now have digital copies of all of them plus a paper copy of Wild Animals. I also always wanted a copy of Ballet which I saw only once at Longlands Primary School summer fair. Delighted to have that 37 years later,

That left my own purchases: Dogs, which I bought because it was there, from the stationary shop opposite my Convent on Hatherley Road. Another one I didn't particularly want was Deep Sea. So no hurry to replace those. But the ones I was eager to replace were my Butterflies and Moths, Extinct Animals. 

Both of these are amoungst the rarest of the series. They were amoungst the last printed, alongside Tower of London and the very last title Heraldry.  I now have both in digital copies & butterflies in a paper copy, I obtained both from Alfriston Zoo, more on that another time.

Some very fine illustrations in this book! It's the art work which has revived interest in these books which have been out of print since around 1979

This is not my original copy. The American editions had inferior photographic images, like this, in the late 1970s.  The British imprint used paintings. For Extinct Animals it featured a sabre tooth tiger killing an extinct species of crane. Extremely rare edition evidenced by no images on Google. One of the very best of the 78 books too.