Matt McIrvin ([info]mmcirvin) wrote,
@ 2006-05-01 00:24:00
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How and Why Wonder Books
How and Why Wonder Books.

I had a lot of these. I remember the Electricity one as disappointing because it consisted almost entirely of dire safety warnings. The one on Sound was one of my favorites (that green cover with the weird grid lines and the collage of sound-related pictures is burned into my mind). But I think the book about dinosaurs that I read the most was a Golden Exploring Earth book instead.

There was also the Tell Me Why series, which attempted to be a sort of FAQ for the entire universe that answered a different question on every page, often unsatisfyingly (e.g. "What is Einstein's Theory of Relativity?" in one page of kid-friendly explanation; I think they admitted on that page that they could only give a very general idea).

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[info]zadcat
2006-04-30 09:48 pm UTC (link)
I had the dinosaur and prehistoric mammal ones, which I loved, although there was an artist's rendering of the extinction of the dinosaurs (lying down dying in the rain) that I found terribly sad. But it was the Our Earth one that did for me: I'd been told that the very small mountain near where I live had been a volcano, and the images of active volcanoes, lava flows and so forth gave me scare material for years.

I only found out much later that while it was a magma intrusion, it was never a volcano as such.

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[info]mskala
2006-04-30 10:28 pm UTC (link)
I recognize some of those cover paintings (some of which are pretty enough to be of interest in themselves), but I remember more the Ladybird and Usborne books, both of which were British in origin and a bit more recent. I'm pretty sure that Usborne is still in business, but they've watered down their line. For instance, I still have my copy of "Machine Code for Beginners", copyright 1983... it doesn't have a suggested age range on it, but I think the target audience would be about 13. Kids these days, soft as they are, would probably expect to have an assembler.

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[info]mmcirvin
2006-05-01 06:11 am UTC (link)
I see the Usborne ones all over in bookstores today. I think they were slightly after my time, at least in US release.

Also, in the seventies, Bantam had a series of little mass-market-paperback sized nonfiction books for kids, with glossy paper and nice color illustrations. The one on Aircraft was one of my most extremely favorite books; I was tickled to see for the first time a plane that I recognized from that when I went to the new Air and Space Museum annex in Virginia. I remember I also had one on Astronomy that was badly glued together and the pages kept falling out.

It occurs to me that I mostly read nonfiction when I was young; I liked fiction too, especially after discovering written science fiction around the age of eight or nine, but I wasn't as much into it and I still read mostly nonfiction into my teenage years. Yet these days I read very little popular nonfiction, at least in book form; I find a lot of it suspect and read mostly novels.

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[info]mmcirvin
2006-05-01 06:43 am UTC (link)
...Also, those instantly recognizable Dorling Kindersley books with the objects on white backgrounds are everywhere today. They've developed a really striking visual style for them, which I think is important for building kid loyalty.

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[info]mmcirvin
2006-05-01 06:47 am UTC (link)
...I had the Wiley Self-Teaching Guide on Atari BASIC.

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[info]urbeatle
2006-04-30 11:06 pm UTC (link)
I had a bunch of these. I started with the dinosaur book in the first grade, then the atomic physics one in second grade. Einstein was my hero for a while.

I had more of this odd little science club series of books, though. I forget the name of the series, but they were 6x8 booklets on individual subjects. Each came withstickers that you were supposed to paste in specific locations, but they were otherwise about the same reading level and quality as the How and Why Wonder books.

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[info]mmcirvin
2006-05-01 05:33 am UTC (link)
Also, I had the insects one but my favorite book on insects was the Golden Guide.

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Special Relativity
[info]vardissakheli
2006-05-01 05:37 am UTC (link)
had a really neat description in one or two pages in World Book, with diagrams of the path of a transverse beam of light in a moving train to illustrate time dilation. I forget how they worked in spatial contraction, though.

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Re: Special Relativity
[info]mmcirvin
2006-05-01 06:31 am UTC (link)
When I was a little older I graduated to spending a lot of time reading the Random House Encyclopedia, which I've mentioned before—it was a sort of radical reimagining of an encyclopedia as a one-volume doorstop attempting to cover every general subject of human knowledge in a lavishly illustrated two-page spread, with a concise, cross-referenced alphabetical section in the back. Their two-page spread on relativity wasn't bad, abetted by a large number of illustrations.

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[info]mmcirvin
2006-05-01 05:45 am UTC (link)
...It's interesting to see how much the attractiveness of the cover design declined when they went from those striking painted, hand-lettered covers to the Seventies ones with more photographs and phototypeset titles. I had the Seventies version of "Rocks and Minerals" with the uninviting array of little rocks against a black background.

Also, they started including more titles on environmental problems that must have struck a discordant note, given that I remember the tone of the others being somewhat cheerleading. The British title THE SPOILT EARTH being the most extreme case. "Happy birthday! Here's a book about how we've already destroyed the world for you. Hope you like picking up the pieces, chump!"

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[info]mmcirvin
2006-05-01 06:23 am UTC (link)
Nobody seems to have pictures of those old Golden Exploring Earth books, which I remember being slightly larger and fancier. The Dinosaurs and Astronomy ones were favorites of mine, and I think I also had some about mammals and birds.

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[info]iayork
2006-05-01 07:52 am UTC (link)
Ballet?

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