Fossil-Hunting Seventies-Style

A couple of posts back (‘Wish I’d Written That’) I made gentle fun of an overly optimistic guide to beachcombing from the 1970s. Here is an altogether more realistic practical guide from the same era, one published by Kestrel Books, a Penguin imprint, in 1977:

The authors tell you EXACTLY where to find what at various sites around the English coast. One such site is Warden Point on the Isle of Sheppey, where the road plunges straight into the sea due to the rapidly eroding clay cliffs – cliffs, note the authors, that can be extremely dangerous after heavy rain. Forewarned is forearmed, so I made sure my two eldest, Jessie and Jimmy, together with their friends Josh and Majella, all wore wellies when I took them fossil-hunting there one rainy day back when they were little. Striding down the steep slope, bucket in one hand, trowel in the other, Majella plunged straight into a mass of waist-deep gloop. After much heaving and hauling we finally managed to extract her not only from the mud but from her boots, which remain buried there to this day, fossils of the far future, and undeterred we all carried on down to the beach, where we became so absorbed in our fossil-hunting that we were almost cut off by the flooding tide (something else, to be fair, that the authors warn about). It was but the first of many happy expeditions to sites recommended in this marvellous little book – a book the like of which, I’m sure, would never be published now, not least for reasons of health and safety!

One of the Best

The name Clive Smith won’t mean anything to anyone outside match fishing, but this 1970s giant of the sport penned one of its most enduringly readable and informative titles, a 1982 offering from the same Newton Abbot outfit I championed in my previous post:

Smith outlines the detailed and often cunning planning that went into his greatest individual and team victories – skipper of the mighty Birmingham team of the 1970s, he was especially renowned for his tactical nous – but in the final chapter he writes frankly of the crushing failure he experienced as a member of the England team fishing in front of a home crowd in the 1981 World Championships. In the same year his book was published he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and died, but he remains a giant in my eyes.

Wish I'd Written That

Do you remember the 1970s, when books worth reading were published? I grew up by the sea, and have always prided myself on my beachcombing prowess – it helps pass the time when fishing and catching nowt (a default state of affairs in my case) – so this little guide from 1972, with illustrations by Robert Gillmor, naturally caught by eye when applying the same powers of perusal to the shelves of a second-hand book shop one day:

It’s just one of many excellent titles published over the years by David & Charles of Newton Abbot in Devon since the company was founded in 1960 by David St John Thomas and the late Charles Hadfield. As for the author, of the BBC’s Natural History Unit fame, there was a time when he was almost never off our screens. You can’t help but admire his optimism. ‘Succeeding tides may uncover and reveal coins lower down the beach,’ he writes, ‘and if you choose the right place you may be rewarded with gold, or with a genuine Spanish piece-of-eight.’ On the opposite page to this pearl of wisdom is a picture of a boy and his dog looking at an old television set lying upside down in the water’s edge.

Those Were the Days

I shudder to think how many words have been penned on the Apollo moon missions – I’ve edited a fair few myself – but it must run into the millions. I think it was Brian Aldiss who said that people won’t ever solve their problems by going into space, but just take them with them. Even so, no one can deny the staggering achievements of NASA in the 1960s and early ‘70s, and the extraordinary bravery of the Apollo astronauts. Two of my favourite books – though strictly speaking they belong to my oldest brother… – are two of the many titles published in the months following the first moon landing. This one came out within 72 hours of splashdown:

This next one is considerably shorter, but punches well above its weight: 

Ryan notes how NASA ‘spent thousands of dollars designing an electric razor with a vacuum cleaner attached to prevent the spacecraft from becoming filled with weightless whiskers, but, as the Apollo 8 crew [Frank Borman, James Lovell, William Anders] demonstrated, shaving foam and a safety razor work just as well...’

An Appropriated Penguin

I was sorting out some books earlier and found this slinky little number, which I’d forgotten I had (actually, I think I may originally have ‘found’ it on Anna’s shelves):

Published in 1939, it was the very first in the King Penguin series, which ended in 1959. King Penguins were the first hardcovers Penguin published, though only those after 1949 had dust jackets. They were also the first Penguins with colour printing. Talking of which, the plates in this one, from John Gould’s The Birds of Great Britain (1873), are fabulous:

Looks like I might have to start collecting the other 75 titles in the series. Or maybe I’ll just look out for no.11, Fishes of Britain’s Rivers and Lakes.

Rivers, Books, Fishing…

…three of the great loves of my life. How I envy, then, the chap in this brief Pathé News film clip from 1940…

 http://www.britishpathe.com/video/floating-library/query/angling

'Calm was the Day...'

‘In the early days of 1939 there arose in me a great desire to find peace beside a river.’ So wrote Irish author and artist Robert Gibbings (1889–1958). And the river in question?

First published in 1940, it is illustrated throughout with his own sublime engravings. The great thing about Gibbings is that many second-hand copies of his books are now on the market (sadly reflecting the recent demise of their original owners, no doubt). The titles alone are so evocative: Coming Down the Wye (1942), Lovely is the Lee (1944), Sweet Cork of Thee (1951), Coming Down the Seine (1953). Gibbings also had a love affair with the South Seas, resulting in such titles as A True Tale of Love in Tonga (1935), Coconut Island (1936), Blue Angels and Whales (1938), and Over the Reefs (1948). But it’s the Thames I most associate him with, and in 1945 Pathé captured his intimate relationship with the river on film for all time, free to view at

www.britishpathe.com/video/robert-gibbings-artist/query/Thames

He completed his own homage to the Thames (and Spenser) in 1957…