Friday, November 27, 2009

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Questions Children Ask

I have an ever-expanding collection of vintage dinosaur art which I'm in the midst of digitizing. Most of it is in the form of obsolete children's books. I'm as big a sucker for old design and illustration as I am for dinosaurs. Mix the two, and I'm happy as a pillbug.

Here's a good one from a 1956 book called Questions Children Ask, published by the Standard Education Society (here's a Flickr set featuring other pages from the same book). It's credited to Henry Harringer (1892-1980), who seems to have been a Chicago-based illustrator who toiled away in obscurity. I can find little information about him, but everything he's connected to is out of Chicago. His only claim to modest fame appears to be a theater, proposed at the Century of Progress Exhibition, which would have brought Ziegfield Follies style shows to the Windy City.
Vintage Dinosaurs
I love this caption: "The Diplodocus was nearly 90 feet long. It had a very small brain and was clumsy and stupid." These old science books always made a point of impugning the intelligence of one dinosaur or another. I can't hold that against old Mr. Harringer, of course.

2 comments:

  1. i'm a big fan of the mosasaur being an icythosaur...

    ReplyDelete
  2. We linked to this post over at ART Evolved, the online palaeo-art community. The link is here http://blogevolved.blogspot.com/2009/12/transitional-art-forms-november-2009.html.

    We invite you to explore the ART Evolved site, and please consider participating in our many regular palaeo-art galleries and discussions

    ReplyDelete

Trolls get baleted.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.