Vintage Dinosaur Art: Animals of Yesterday

As regular readers will have noticed, I've received a great many scanned books by e-mail from Charles Leon, all very gratefully received (even the dino sex article). Animals of Yesterday, originally published in 1941 (with this edition arriving in 1966) is mostly a rather run-of-the-mill pre-Renaissance dinosaur book, stocked with the usual Zallingerian swamp beasts. All the same, it does present certain mysteries that I'd love for any readers familiar with museums in Milwaukee to clear up, and moreover it's a book from Charles' personal collection. I feel quite honoured!

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Discovering Dinosaurs

Don't you love it when an otherwise quite run-of-the-mill old dinosaur book hides one or two remarkable secrets? The vast majority of Discovering Dinosaurs is as predictable as anything; it's 1960, so here are some green-and-brown Charles Knight rejects, statically positioned about the place and staring vacantly into the middle distance like they've just been forced to listen to someone explain how carbon dioxide couldn't possibly be a greenhouse gas because 'it's plant food'. However, there's more to Gustav Schrotter's illustrations than is first apparent...as we shall see.

Many thanks yet again to Charles Leon for sending me the scans you see here (and more besides). You're quite the wonderful bloke.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Animals of Long Ago

It seems that in the 1950s and 60s, there was a real explosion in the popularity of dinosaur books for kids. Perhaps it had something to do with broader pop culture trends of the period, such as the sci-fi B-movie boom. Although the Dino Renaissance had yet to take hold, there was a noticeable shift in tone - where dinosaurs were previously seen as evolutionarily unimportant, authors suddenly took great relish in detailing the huge size of their jaws, their flesh-tearing ferociousness, the sheer terror they must have induced in their prey. Animals of Long Ago, published in 1965, is a seminal example of a book from the period; the illustrations are somewhat half-hearted, er, homages, but the text is often rip-roaringly good. Many thanks to Charles Leon for sending me this one!

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs (The Open Gate Library)

As you might imagine (and as I'm sure I've repeatedly said over the last three or so years), it's become increasingly difficult to find truly old books to use in Vintage Dinosaur Art posts. In recent months, all of my best eBay purchases seem to be from a single store, the aptly titled 'World of Rare Books'. When one does have the opportunity to cover a decades-old, illustration-heavy publication, it's typically full of tiresome Charles Knight rip-offs loitering around remarkably sparse backdrops, typically with all the vibrant colour of an original Game Boy screen. And I won't lie - this is pretty much one of those. However, there are just enough amusing quirks in here to make it worthwhile. Just check out that gnarly Ceratosaurus...

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Life Through The Ages

It's difficult to imagine now, but there was a time when the cover star of a book on prehistoric animals wouldn't inevitably have been a (Mesozoic) dinosaur. In our post-post-Dino Renaissance world, we're used to fast-moving, feathered theropods, ankylosaurs with legs and necks worth a damn, sauropods not just wandering around on terra firma but brontosmashing each other in the process, and Bob Bakker's face replacing that of Santa Claus so slowly, no one even noticed. Back in the day, however, dinosaurs were seen as mere failures of evolution, twiddling their stupid fat reptilian thumbs until they were all wiped out and the superior mammals could saunter in and take over. Picture yourself now in 1961, thumbing your own way through Life Through The Ages.